I remember being constantly told by authority figures both individually and in a group setting that we would never be able to handle the Real World.

The scary distant Real World turned out to be much easier to handle than the artificial one behind the walls of the schoolyard.

And to wit, by all objective measures, I ended up "handling" the Real World far better than any of the people who told me I wouldn't.

I tuned out to those the moment I got to middle school and realized that I did not have to write all my assignments in pen, use cursive, or risk having my assignment shredded if I forgot to put my name on it.

Being an authoritarian asshole is probably a coping mechanism for teachers who struggle to navigate the same hellscape the students must. Teachers aren't immune from the school yard popularity contest: the charismatic teachers seem to have a much easier life than the rest.

I found it was usually older teachers who were authoritarian luddites. I don't think it was a coping mechanism, I just think that's how they genuinely thought the "real world" still works, as they had been teaching for 40 years and had no idea what non-teaching jobs and university were actually like.

Those were probably the same teachers that told you that you wouldn't always have a calculator in your pocket.

Those who can do, those who can’t teach*

Maybe those who teach secondary school do so because they have difficulty handling the real world.

* I both work as a full time developer at a fortune 100 company and teach a few sections of a college level programming class each semester. So I don’t know what this says about me.

Oh please. How is being a teacher not a role in the real world? You don’t have kids, you don’t realize that the real world loops back around again.

I actually have 7 kids. What made you think I don’t have any kids?

> a mental shock for many teenagers when they either enter college

The typical live-in-a-dorm college experience is not so much a mental shock as is about putting off adult life for another four years, while you party.

And, while older (30+) students do exist, most of them don't live in dorms (And those that do, don't live with all the 18-20 year olds.) They will be, at best on the distant periphery of your peer group.

For most people, college does not solve this problem.

For many, living in a dorm is a chance to slowly learn how to do things like laundry or cooking or paying rent without a parent directly involved.

Although undergrad is an opportunity to work in a research lab where you start to collaborate with graduate students and the professor that runs the lab. Additionally universities have many "students" (TAs,SAs,PLAs, there's many titles for them) running classes, so it provides a role model for students in a digestible n+1 format.

The overwhelming majority of students who go to college never see the inside of a lab - unless they need to stop by the 'computer lab' to print something off.

Most people, as it turns out, don't pursue technical degrees. Fewer than 10% of degrees are in STEM fields, with another ~10% being in a medicine-adjacent field.

The number of undegraduates who actually go on to do meaningful, novel, work in a lab (As opposed to just using a facility for a few hours, in order to pass a course) is even smaller than that.

> rather than a gradual acquisition of actual maturity

I don't think that's for the reasons you outlined, but rather because adolescents are treated like children right up until they've turned 18 and finished high school.

They go from basically having the rights and responsibilities of a child, to those of an adult, rather than a gradual growth of those rights and responsibilities as they mature.

Also, is it not common for teenagers to have jobs any more? I got my first job when I was 15, and haven't been unemployed for longer than a month since (I'm in my late 20s now).