I hate this whole prior generation always thinking we're getting stupider trope. What do you base this on?
We have youngest entrepreneurs than ever before. People are independent (living on own, pursuing career, etc) younger than ever.
Legit stupidity is a failure of our abysmal rural south education system.
Those "entrepreneurs" are making garbage penny apps on a garbage app store or youtubing/instagramming themselves. All of this, the world now has "so many entrepreneurs!" is just misleading claims confusing "Self-employment" with entrepreneurs. And even the legit ones, they offer very little serviceable or worthwhile content. Most of them are just self-aggrandizing asshats that wouldn't give two dicks about humanity.
why? because people don't exist. We now have an entire generation of humans, for the first time on this planet, that will effectively progressed through all primary stages of cognitive development, barely having interacted with actual humans, in the ways that humans evolved to interact with each other, thus forming the basis for civil life. I'm not saying we're doomed--it's possibly just a new paradigm--but this is thoroughly upending millions of years of behavioral evolution that formed the foundations of human interaction and life. That's definitely "a thing."
Also, there are plenty of abysmal rural northern, midwestern, western, and urban education systems. It's both abysmal and great in the same places, throughout the country. Sure, it isn't as great as it used to be, but we're actually still doing pretty good compared to most other countries. The absolute last thing we need here is the shit-ass structure of the Japanese/Korean/Chinese systems that produce nothing but automatons, completely incapable of creative thought. This is why the Chinese can only copy, never develop. (I only mention this, seemingly un-prompted, because that is the popular comparison to the "failing US education system," and it's a shit comparison. We definitely do education better than those countries, we're just shit at ensuring that everyone has access to it.). For the most part, parents have gotten lazier and often confuse their complete lack of engagement in their children's education with some teacher that isn't doing the 6-7 jobs that are now, preposterously, assigned to them. Oh right, 8: now some asshats want them to be armed bodyguards.