The reality is a lot more complicated. That starts with the question of how you measure how clever and/or well educated a generation is. As it turns out, there is an observer effect, related to the Heisenberg principle, and you can't measure intelligence and education without at the same time affecting it. Thus standardized testing led to schools "teaching to the test", which affected what pupils did and didn't learn to do. But an ever greater problem, unsurprisingly, as it is very often the culprit, is statistics.

Statistics say that by various measures of intelligence and education, the world roughly got smarter in the 20th century, the Flynn effect, and dumber in the 21st century, the reverse Flynn effect. The fundamental problem of headline numbers in statistics is that an average frequently hides the truth. The average wealth between Elon Musk and me is half a trillion dollars, but that simply doesn't tell you anything about my financial situation. Only if you drill a lot deeper and look at more detailed statistical data like percentiles a better picture emerges.

The truer picture about intelligence and education of young people is that even in the latest generations, the top 10% of pupils are better educated and more intelligent than the top 10% of previous generations were, and the Flynn effect continues. But the bottom 10% of pupils today are much, much less educated and are often lacking very basic problem solving skills. The gap between the best and and the worst has gone up very much, and the bottom has sunk so precipitously that the average has been going down.

Now again you can attempt to attach your favorite scapegoat reason for everything to those data. Personally, as I have always been worried about the rise in economic inequality, I can't help but think that a rise in economic inequality also results in a rise in educational inequality. Or to say it differently, the way that things are taught at school are not sufficient for a pupil without additional adult supervision at home to end up with a good education. With the likelihood of a pupil getting adult supervision when doing his homework being very much linked to socio-economic factors. Richer kids have tutors and prep schools, poorer kids are left to their own devices.

Homework in itself is a flawed system. Imagine a page with 20 math problems, all about addition of two numbers between 10 and 99. With some guidance, a kid of the appropriate age could learn a lot about fundamentals of addition from doing those 20 math problems. But chances are that nobody has explained to the kid that the purpose of doing those 20 additions is for him to learn something about additions. He just got handed the piece of paper and been told that he has to return it with the correct results on it. As long as the kid has any access to any electronic device, he'll realize that the fastest way to fill out the results correctly is by the use of anything from a calculator to Google search, without going through the hard and seemingly unnecessary step of learning about addition yourself.

Of course the advances in technology are partially to blame. Calculators existed already when I was young (and led to intense discussion in education). But ChatGPT can also write that essay about "what I did this summer" or do that book summary for a pupil, bypassing the need to develop writing and reading skills. Thus the scary headlines about pupils getting a high school degree without being able to read competently. At the same time another lucky kid is helped to develop skills in reading and writing, PLUS being taught about when to use ChatGPT, and how to competently judge and use the result. Guess which kid will do better in life afterwards.

In summary, if you were to go into hibernation and wake up in the future, chances are that society isn't ruled by idiots then. There will be highly intelligent and educated people around, and they will have most of the power in society. The question is how dumb the least educated people in society are, and that could possibly be some sort of dystopian future. Or humanity learns how to create better education systems, in which pupils aren't left alone with homework and have to decide for themselves whether to use quick fix technology to return it.