Maybe not smarter but better learning tools and teachers. They have so much information at their fingertips it's scary. The problem for them is sifting through all of the garbage to find the answers, but the answers are all there along with the facts. They just need some guidance about how to analyse the information. When they get that they seem to accelerate much faster. We had very little information to analyse. Everything was in print and some of it was too old to be relevant.
I didn't watch the debate. I watched the highlights of the first one and that was enough for me.