Kids or Young Adults?

I found this picture online from the 1940s. High school students. Are they really the same age as our high school kids now? Is it me, or, considering kids today, they a) have prolonged adolescence phases (maybe going into someone's 20s and beyond) and b) mature sexually way too fast. The joke in the teacher's lunch room is that our students are having a lot more sex than we are. Some girls in the high school are now into other girls; basically, they've done everything else, so this is "the next thing" to try.

So we have sexually mature teens who cannot write complete sentences and cannot find the nation of Turkey on a world map. I often think of my grandfather, born in 1917. He only finished the 8th grade, it was the Depression, he went into the CCC and then straight to the army, was in the Pacific during WWII and worked in a machine shop after the war until he retired. For someone who only finished the 8th grade, he seemed to do alright in his day, given the nature of how the US economy was largely based at that time, manufacturing. Even with a one-room schoolhouse, 8th grade education, he could read and write better than a good number of my students today. That generation was unique, as every generation is. But they had to grow up a lot quicker than the rest of us and they most likely married the first person they slept with (can we imagine that?) And then I look out at our kids, could these kids today do what our granparents were doing at 14, 16, or 18? I really don't know. And then of course, tomorrow is Memorial Day, a national holiday, another day off of school. I wonder how many of our students think to acknowledge the significance of Memorial Day, or even know what it really is.