User blog comment:Eikakou/L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables: Fire and Dew review/@comment-4934571-20170705232712/@comment-1442230-20170707001725

I'm thinking back when the stories were set, Anne (at the end of Anne of Green Gables) was a bit younger than expected for a teacher (since she took the advanced class to complete the course sooner), so she would have been around sixteen (and seventeen if she hadn't completed the advanced class). Jane's probably sixteen as well (Gilbert's maybe one or two years older?) And I'm guessing the expectation was that Anne and Jane, being quite young, would only teach a few years until they got married? (And in the novels, we can still see how Anne's not as mature as she is expected to be as the Avonlea schoolteacher.)

(I apparently don't look my age either - I'm in my late twenties... but I think it also depends on who's guessing my age. Most people skew their guesses younger.  I've gotten fifteen before.  O_o  But at eighteen, I'm pretty sure I couldn't teach a class of contemporary elementary school students.  And nowadays, I don't feel like public school teachers in Canada get a lot of respect for what they do and the challenges they have to face - in the part of Canada where I'm from, the teachers are perceived as instruments of their union and that union is perceived as just being greedy for money, so people don't support them.  It didn't help that the province under the previous government enacted some very unfair restrictive legislation to make it as difficult as possible for the teachers to fight for better classroom conditions until the Supreme Court of Canada struck down that legislation last year as unconstitutional. Any way...)

I'm not really criticizing the actors for not looking the part (it can't be helped) and the decision to cast younger actors and have them try to look older might have been to make them more relatable to the contemporary target audience (the L.M. Montgomery's Anne series seems geared more towards a younger audience than the 1985 miniseries can appeal to a pretty wide age-range, while the 2017 Anne series is definitely more for a more mature audience). I think of all the young actors, Ella Ballentine did approach the role with the right sort of maturity in Fire & Dew (and the costuming helped), especially when she returns from Queen's and starts asking about how Marilla and Matthew are doing and actively looking for ways to save Green Gables (though her scaring off the insistent pushy buyer, while losing her temper was very Anne-ish, it felt like a forced demonstration of Anne's decisiveness). I think it's more... the script trying too hard to make them all seem mature and maybe trying too hard to put in memorable lines from the novel to "prove" it was being true to the source.