by Jerges Cervantes

Created on: April 18, 2010   Last Updated: April 19, 2010

It’s a hard task, getting down and defining such a thing as intelligence. It can be even harder to infer that we could be smarter than the generations before us. There’s an old saying, “Go slowly, and listen to your elders,” that is applicable to this debate. Someone suggested that once for a reason, and the reason is that your elders, your parents and grandparents, have far more experience in the world than you do assuredly.

It’s easy to say we’re probably not as smart as our parents. Even when they do foolish things and we think, “How could they have even made that mistake?” they still often get through the messes they create. Intellect isn’t about who can calculate massive algebraic equations or who knows what qualia are; intellect is far more than that. Intellect is getting things done, accomplishment, facing the hard facts of life, holding a job, saving money, paying for expenses, raising a child, and all manner of things that our families have been doing for years.

It’s a mistake to assume you’re smarter than them, when intelligence is based far more on the experience of the person than their age or textbook knowledge. You might have studied all of college, and made straight A’s, but if you never learned how to solve your own problems (and your children’s when and if you have them) then you haven’t learned anything but skills. Self-reliability is something our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etcetera, etcetera, have learned day in and day out their whole lives.

It’s true that some people never learn, but that being the case, we can’t expect to compare ourselves to someone whom we deem inferior to ourselves, anyway. If you look at how hard our families worked, how hard most of our forefathers and ancestors had to work before the advent of modern medicine and entertainment, the amount of stress they had to deal with each day just to pull in enough money to live on, there is no other answer than to say they were smarter. They realized the importance of hard work and patience, something most youth today have lost sight of.

Technological advances are no means a measure of how smart a generation is compared to the next. While we have made a lot of progress as a species, generations of individuals are what pulled the machine forward for us; we must not forget that.

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