Turns out the answer is interesting - about 50 years ago, the graduation rate for high school was around 50%. These days it's much higher (90% or more in some areas).
Does this mean the children is learning? Perhaps.
It also may represent a failure of our systems - in the past, not everyone needed a high school degree to be a functional member of society, and forcing those people to "graduate" may in fact be a net loss to society.
In other countries, this is explicit: people are tracked to "educational" vs. "vocational" career tracks earlier, and there is not the emphasis on graduation rates as a metric.
Kids also drink less alcohol, commit less crime, get teenage pregnant less often. So yeah, they are likely to be learning more then in 1970.
> drink less alcohol, commit less crime, get teenage pregnant less often
Stats lie.
Their doctors give them drugs way more fun than alcohol, all of their crimes are unattributable to them because they're being committed in a virtual world where there is no accountability (it's not the Boomers SWATing each other, DDoSing anything that disagrees with them, and running fraudulent crowdfunding grifts), and the decline in teenage pregnancy has more to do with the entire demographic's sexual interests being fine-tuned to bespoke pornography and/or their own reflections.
Number of school shootings only ever increases, and an entire generation claims to be mentally ill. Something is wrong here.
In here, I would point out that SWATing is a thing solely and absolutely because adult cops behave over the top aggressively. SWATing is not a thing in countries with less aggression and violence prone police. Not because their teenagers would be overall better, but because their police forces are harder to be used.