Certainly almost everyone have heard at some point in their life, that with age comes wisdom. To know if this is true, one needs a good definition of the word. In the Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the subject (which is highly recommended), the conditions for a person S to be wise are these:

S is wise if

1. S has extensive factual and theoretical knowledge.

2. S knows how to live well.

3. S is successful at living well.

4. S has very few unjustified beliefs.

Let’s look at these conditions and see how old people and young people do (generally speaking): 

S has extensive factual and theoretical knowledge

As one gets older one has had more and more time to learn about different things, and thus, get more knowledgeable. This does indeed increase the probability of old people knowing more than young people. However, there are a few things that are also to be taken into consideration. For example, old people are more likely to suffer from various brain diseases like dementia, or getting a stroke which could damage a large portion of the brain. Also, when one gets older, the process of learning is slowed down which makes it harder for old people to learn new things and keep up with what is important in the contemporary society, something that isn’t much of a problem for young people.

S knows how to live well and S is successful at living well

As old people have managed to hang around for such a long while, it’s quite logical to assume that many of them know to a certain extent how to live well, and that they know how to live based on experience. This means that old people will often have aquired one essential part of wisdom, but this doesn’t mean in any way that young people don’t know how to live well. It merely means that young people haven’t had the opportunity to show their ability to lead a good life yet. This in turn means that it’s easier to recognize the presence of wisdom in an old person than in a young person, but it doesn’t say much whether old people are wiser than young people in general, or vice versa.

S has very few unjustified beliefs

In general, this is not true for old people, and it’s not true for young people. In general, people tend to believe what they have read or heard without putting the information up to scrutiny, which consequently leads to a number of both unjustified and false beliefs. This means that in order for a person to be wise, he/she has to be sceptical and willing to invest time and effort to determine the validity of a claim. The ability to think sceptically and to critically check the credibility of a source isn’t something that comes with age. It comes mainly with practise, and so, there are many old persons who are wise, but that has come from hard work and dedication – not from just sitting down and getting old.

Wisdom isn’t like a wisdom tooth that either comes or doesn’t come. Wisdom has to be earned.