Stop Associating Age With Intelligence and Comprehension of The Things Around Us

"You're wise beyond your age", "you're much smarter than your age"; these and many more such things have been said to me and I bet many other young people. There was a time I used to feel glad whenever people expressed shock at my age in light of the things I know. It made me feel better, special even. Till recently when I had a certain conversation with myself.

Another annoying one is when young people say they do not watch news channels or listen to news stations because such things are meant for their fathers and older people. There's this notion that age has something to do with understanding of the world and how things should be. I can somehow understand the root cause. Most of our parents and their parents before them and their ancestors before them grew up at a time when knowledge was "hoarded" and transfered to people only after attaining a certain age.

It was during this period that children were denied things that seemed like luxuries, likes eggs, with the laughable excuse that giving them these things would make them become thi!eves. So I clearly understand their reluctance to let young people get certain information and stay abreast with the issues of the day.

However, we've moved beyond that era. We've grown as humans. Several customs which are irrelevant to present times and/or detrimental to societal advancement have been replaced with newer, time compatible habits and customs. Culture is meant to evolve, to become more suited to the changes in time. Most cultures we have are as a result of the natural elements that were prevalent and the amount of knowledge available at the time when these customs were formulated.

These elements have however undergone massive changes due to human activities and even natural causes. There's been an increase in discoveries and much more knowledge is available now. As such, man has to adapt to the current state of things and his customs which are basically the sum total of his way of life should evolve and change. Bottom line is that for we to grow as a people, we need to drop certain things.


We need to stop associating age with intelligence and comprehension of the things around us. Granted, with age comes more experiences because you have to stay alive to learn. However, this does not mean, that certain knowledge is strictly for the old. There are many older people who are grossly under informed and there are young people who are so informed that people start calling them showoffs.

Knowledge is more a function of exposure than of age. There are older people who have never moved beyond their comfort zones, who are more comfortable spinning conspiracy theories than seeking out facts and doing something with these facts. And there are young people, who have toured the world and have gathered so much knowledge, maybe not physically but mentally through the pages of books.

I think it's time for us to stop making knowledge and wisdom (which is basically understanding and applying knowledge gathered appropriately) seem unattainable by young people. Young people should be encouraged to learn more, to seek out knowledge. If we want to grow as a people, we cannot keep repeating the same mistakes. We cannot wait till young people get into the position of authority or get older before the need to be knowledgeable is foisted upon us.

We have to start learning, we have to stay informed, draw up strategies, build our wisdom muscles so we don't end up like a certain someone who after contesting for presidential elections several times, turned out to be clueless after winning the election finally. Let's stay informed. Knowledge is not reserved for only a certain type of people.