This is true of people all 'intellects'.
When people talk of 'intellects' they don't usually mean emotional intellects.
Emotional intellects can be high at any age. The neglected child probably has a high emotional intellect because they know what need is , they see what fulfilling that need is, and (in how they are treated) they see what not fulfilling that need is.
To make a society full of wisest we should probably be forensically looking at some of the most deprived areas as a starting point, gauging their emotional intelligence rather than just how many skiing trips they've been on or whether or not they've seen 'The Inbetweeners' and can enjoy it 'ironically'. We should be fishing them out potential harm that might come their way, putting them in grammar or public schools.
But that's not what the comprehensive system suggested. It left clever , but in some way vulnerable, children, at the mercy of how they chose to interact with people (inculding some teachers) less intuitively clever than they were.
All it did was reinforce being forced to learn the kinds of 'street life skills' that they might have relied upon where they live.
So I suggest that we were a more grown more society before the comprehensive experiment came in, before, like children bored of their train set, the government tore up branch lines and concentrated on the motorway, a more grown up society before convenience food and convenience relationships became a norm, a more grown up society before the 1960s wave of universities came in, more grown up before more people went to university which served only to make them think that they were probably cleverer than those who hadn't been 'unless proven otherwise'. More grown up before the 'space race' and spiralling footballers' wages. More grown up before the countryside became the place for the richish middle class creating a kind of ghetto of stereotypical 'niceness', rather than the place for the working and upper class. More grown up before 'the new middle class' existed leading people to not really know what the 'old middle class' was. Prudent? Austere? Tasteful?What?
if you feel grown up when you are very young, follow your path. Emigrate to do so if needs must. Otherwise who would you be trying to impress? A country full of insecure, usually slightly ill-educated, stunted, people!