Are children responding more cleverly?

Sir, your “Are children getting cleverer?, in the FT-Weekend of August 12, did not fully answer the question but instead left me with the feeling that us adults might be getting more stupid, as I was not able to answer correctly any of your stupidly easy question examples, though I suspected the Stoker-Dracula connection, for no particular reason at all, least intelligence.

That said, and since you felt that your international readers were not in need of any help and did not supply the answers, I did what the young are supposed to do, I googled them and came up with the answers, which felt good, but again left me with the feeling that this had little relevance to intelligence.

The report, though quite interesting, reduced itself too much to the measuring of intelligence in terms of answers to questions, when we as a society are more interested and in need of clever responses. Why on earth should we benefit from having geniuses running around if they all insist on behaving like lunatics?

clever children