Most adults feel that the younger generation is more intelligent than they are. Parents watch with wonder as a small child handles a smartphone with ease, or speaks about things they had not even heard of at that age. Is it really true?
Simple extrapolation shows the flaw in this belief. If each new generation were more intelligent than the one before it, the gains would have added up over the centuries, and by now the average person would be a genius several times over. But is it so? No! Then what?
Actually, the younger generation is more informed than the older generation. The volume of information available to the human race is increasing exponentially, and children today have easy access to it. A schoolchild today knows more physics than Isaac Newton did. That does not make the child more intelligent than Newton. It only means the child has inherited what Newton and many others worked out. Our children are more informed than us, which is a different thing from being more intelligent.
When we did our Intermediate (Senior Secondary) examination in the 1980s and were preparing for competitive examinations like the JEE, good practice problems were difficult to find. One had to search through Resnick and Halliday, Nelson and Parker's Advanced Level Physics, and books like Elementary Problems in Physics. Today a student has H.C. Verma's Concepts of Physics, which covers most of the practice problems needed for the JEE. Besides, there is coaching material, online lectures and apps that explain every solution step by step.
That scarcity had a hidden benefit. Since problems were hard to come by, we stayed with each one for a long time. There was often no worked solution to check against, so we kept at it, got it wrong, and tried again. In the process we learnt how to think a problem through. Today's student can find the answer to almost anything in seconds, and can now even ask an AI tool to solve it. But having the answer at hand is not the same as being able to arrive at it.
The abundance itself is not a bad thing. Today's children can learn more, and faster, than we ever could. A bright child in a small town now has access to the same books and lectures as a child in a big city. That is a real gain. But information is only the raw material. Intelligence lies in what one does with it, in being able to apply it to a problem one has never seen before.
So our children are neither more intelligent than us nor less. They have simply grown up with far more information than we had. Parents need not be overawed by a child's ease with gadgets, nor should they dismiss what the child knows. What we can give them is what we learnt the hard way: patience with a difficult problem and the habit of thinking for oneself. Information they will always find. The habit of thinking has to be learnt.