"You're not old yet"

I can hear the young ones saying that.
There is a piece in the paper this morning about a plan for a school to mix with an aged care home and have both the young and the old in the same classroom for lessons in things like history, music, art, cookery and perhaps other things. The idea is to keep older minds active and give younger minds the benefit of the experience of older minds.
Will it work? I don't know. If it can be done and people want to participate then I think the idea has merit. 
There are all sorts of practical issues and legal issues which would need to be overcome of course. I can only assume that those planning this have thought these through.
And then there is this... teaching adults and teaching children are two very different things. I have said elsewhere that there are certain assumptions I can make when teaching adults  in some settings. 
In just over two weeks from now I have to teach a small group of adults to do something. It is not, for reasons aside from the teaching, something I am very happy about but I said I would so I will. I have put a lot of thought and preparation into what I will do and how I will do it.
It's knitting. I will ask people to cast on a certain number of stitches. Now I will assume that everyone in the class knows (a) how to cast on and (b) that they can count and will have the right number of stitches. I might say "double check" because I know that everyone, including myself, might make a mistake when counting stitches. It is a relatively small number of stitches and easy to check. If it was a much larger number I would tell them one of the ways in which knitters can count a large number of stitches accurately. That would not be assuming they cannot count. It would simply be saying, "There's a less frustrating way of getting the count right."
With children in a small group I would individually check with them because not having the right number of stitches would mean they couldn't do the next step.  They would not be as experienced at casting on stitches and might have done something like make an extra stitch by accidentally putting the yarn over the needle.
Being aware of such things is all part of the teaching process. 
I will go on to the knitting and talk about things like "in front" and "behind" and "carrying the yarn across" and "keeping the same tension across the row". Adults who can do even just basic knitting will know something about these things. Children would need to be reminded unless they were, unusually, experienced and confident knitters. 
Having both children and adults in the same classroom in order to teach them would be an enormous challenge for teachers. The immense variation in levels of skill and understanding would require constant awareness. It would be interesting to try.
Perhaps though what will happen is that the adults will help to teach the children. That would be no bad thing.
And mixing younger and older can work. The Danish project which has mixed university students with the aged is apparently still working well. Not all students want to do it of course and I don't doubt that those involved are watched for any number of reasons. But, it means that the young need to confront the realities of old age and even death while gaining from the experience of their elders. 
That can be a very good thing indeed...so I hope the mixing of the two will go ahead and that it works. We might all learn from it.