Gen Z has managed something no modern generation pulled off before. After more than a century of steady academic gains, test scores finally went the other direction. For the first time ever, a new generation is officially dumber than the previous one.
The data comes from neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, who has spent years reviewing standardized testing results across age groups. “They’re the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized academic tests than the one before it,” Horvath told the New York Post. The declines cut across attention, memory, literacy, numeracy, executive function, and general IQ. That’s not just one weak spot. That’s the whole darn dashboard blinking at once.
Horvath took the same message to Capitol Hill during a 2026 Senate hearing on screen time and children. His framing skipped the generational dunking and focused on exposure. “More than half of the time a teenager is awake, half of it is spent staring at a screen,” he told lawmakers. Human learning, he argued, depends on sustained attention and interaction with other people. Endless feeds and condensed content don’t offer either.
This is click bait
They are not dumber. They are due to their environment though deficient in critical thinking. They do not problem solve very well.
sigh. every generation has this article. and even if it was true the failure would still be at the previous generations, because kids can’t be blamed for the school system we decide for them or a society thats so anti family that parents barely have time to give attention to their kids.
don’t worry gen z: they told the same stuff about us etc. blame generations so we don’t see that the real unfairness always was and still is the distribution of wealth.
Every generation literally doesn’t is the point? I do think the framing is bad, but the generational decrease, as a cohort, in attention spans, technical literacy, and skills competency has been a major worry for over a decade now. Computer science educators were sounding the alarm on this in the mid and late teens, for example.
Elementary school teachers right now are sounding the alarms over Gen Alpha too. It’s catastrophically bad. The education system isn’t just flawed or broken, it’s actively fucking collapsing. There are a shocking amount of kids now that literally can’t read. At all.
The point has some validity - the presence of an easy solution allows us to avoid internalizing our lessons.
The same was said about my generation (Millenials) because we were allowed to use a calculator. And quite frankly, it’s true - I am less capable of mental calculation than my boomer parents. Now that I have kids I have forced myself to do more in my head or on paper to set an example, and I have improved.
It’s not that their neurons are inferior or that they cannot learn. It’s that it isn’t worth bothering to remember facts or formulae when every little bit of information is a click away.
We had calculators but they have llms and what looks like a failing school system that -at least where I’m from- has been removing a whole lot of traditional calculus / grammar and generally « old style » programs with more participative approaches.
Together with less formal scoring, automatic passing year by year for while, not more Latin or higher math or science to make room for more societal or practical classes.
Much bigger classes, less teachers…
Intuitively I don’t like a whole lot of that. Now I understand that whoever came up with this knows what they are doing but still.
I’ll just have this here
I wonder if just a larger percentage of Gen Z thinks standardized testing is bullshit and don’t even try. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I strongly believe the internet has been a greater evil than benefit to the world, and also believe cell phones have done serious damage to attention spans and focus. That is to say, I’m firmly at the “get off my lawn you damn kids” stage of life. But at the same time I admire so much of the younger generations that don’t buy into the “work hard and it pays off” bullshit that I was raised with.
Yay! We did it!
Don’t worry kids, parent are busy and corporations need money. Just watch some more Jake Paul on Youtube and don’t think about it. Or anything else for that matter.
That’s so aesthetic. It’s giving aura.
That’s possible but also quite possibly attributable to the constant erosion of our schools and drift in curriculum. The last decade has seen enormous reductions in education quality.
Perhaps could compare similar data from countries that aren’t destroying their school systems as effectively.
“The same decline appears outside the United States. Horvath told senators that across roughly 80 countries, academic performance drops after digital technology becomes widely embedded in classrooms. The timing alone raises serious questions about how learning environments affect cognitive development.”
Doesn’t say which 80 but 80 should be a broad swath
Because asshole politicians are cutting education spenditure everywhere. At least in Hungary, they’re doing it because “we told you, the thinking machine came, now go to a trade school”.
imo its the ipad parents and tik tok
maybe the microplastics get to all of us too. not like the older people took any tests
I was one of the last classes to graduate before everyone got school-issued laptops or tablets, back in 2015.
I’m kinda glad I didn’t go to school or grow up doing everything on a computer. The retention and repetition just isn’t there with me, or most others it seems. Like those typing courses in computer class that we did in elementary; I still type everything using my index fingers and almost nothing else.
But another part of me wishes I was more computer literate. All I really know how to do is plug stuff in and sign into my profile.
Missed that while skimming. Thanks!
“After class, students returned to phones, tablets, and laptops, bouncing between social feeds and bite-sized explanations of material they never sat with for very long. Horvath described the outcome as students trained to skim. Skimming feels efficient, but it doesn’t build depth.”
Presidency after presidency education has been getting cut while the war budget continue to grow.
Not to mention contaminants like microplastics and Pfas
I was terrible at standardized tests. I was in gifted and learning disability classes at the same time in middle school (basically because of ADHD and losing my homework, forgetting it at home, etc.) I’m a successful software engineer who learns languages as a hobby and also run a second business (a small farm) while volunteering sometimes in my village. I think I did OK in that regard. If standardized tests aren’t working for Gen Z, we should find a better way to measure things. I doubt the sky is falling.
I’m not sure why this article frames this outcome as the fault of Gen Z. It’s not their fault their parents gave them iPads instead of spending time with them, nor for the chronically underfunded educational system.
I am Gen X and our parents plunked us in front of the TV however there were only 3 channels that often had nothing of interest to kids on. But they also kicked us out of the house all day so we had to find other kids to play with and negotiate with, so got more exercise, had adventures without adults managing every minute of our time. We walked to school by ourselves, no buses picking us up at the door. But the parents didn’t really spend more time with us because they were working… sometimes more than one job and daycare did not exist. Now if you did that as a parent, you would get CPS called on you. Also GenX parents went hard the other way being helicopter parents. I was more of a free range parent so had to find other ones to find kids for my son to do things with like ride bikes to the park or drop off to the movies. There has to be a happy medium.
Ironic. The article does not frame the outcome as the fault of Gen Z. It in fact goes to great lengths to point out that the fault almost certainly lies with how they were educated, and the parenting environment they were raised in.
I’ll highlight the framed factors for you and where the blame gets pointed.
Horvath took the same message to Capitol Hill during a 2026 Senate hearing on screen time and children. His framing skipped the generational dunking and focused on exposure. “More than half of the time a teenager is awake, half of it is spent staring at a screen,” he told lawmakers. Human learning, he argued, depends on sustained attention and interaction with other people. Endless feeds and condensed content don’t offer either.
Schools leaned hard into technology during the same window. Educational software replaced textbooks, long readings, and extended problem-solving. After class, students returned to phones, tablets, and laptops, bouncing between social feeds and bite-sized explanations of material they never sat with for very long.
“I’m not anti-tech. I’m pro-rigor,” Horvath told the Post. Rigor, in his view, comes from friction. Reading full texts. Working through confusion. Spending time with material that doesn’t immediately reward you. Take that friction away, and cognitive skills dull. Brains adapt to the environment they’re given, and this one prizes speed over staying power.
The same decline appears outside the United States. Horvath told senators that across roughly 80 countries, academic performance drops after digital technology becomes widely embedded in classrooms. The timing alone raises serious questions about how learning environments affect cognitive development.
This conversation feels uncomfortable because it doesn’t offer villains or easy fixes. Horvath summed it up bluntly during his testimony. “A sad fact our generation has to face is this: Our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.” His recommendation focused on restraint, dialing back screens in schools, and restoring depth before the next generation is doomed.
Most frustrating for me is not just that many people read this article and take away an emotive framing that is completely counter to the text of the article, but that many people on Lemmy that read this article will just memory-hole it and continue to complain about phone bans in school, and the under-16 social media bans going on around the world that are very likely to have significant positive benefits for children’s learning and go some ways to resolving the problem.
I appreciate the effort you out into highlighting relevant sections 👍
Bans and laws like that might have good intentions, but realistically enforcement is either impossible, or the perfect tracking tool on a country or world wide scale…
Like discord requiring government IDs and face scans; Do you really trust companies & governments to do the right thing, or should we just learn to maybe socialize with our children more?
I understand your complaints entirely; something really should be done. I just hate that it takes government interference with crappy bans, instead of empowering parents with resources (not working 50+ hours a week to survive) and knowledge (hey maybe 14 hours of screentime isn’t very pro-social).
Sidenote: that part about speed over staying power, I felt that myself. At least within the US, everything is always GOGOGO and cramming over real learning. Probably something with the time is money thing, but school and a lot of college felt like memorization over problem solving or skill building.
I’m in agreement that the privacy grab-bag of age verification services is a big concern, but in my mind the remedy to that is strong privacy laws and protections like GDPR - with harsh punitive penalties for any companies that break them.
Companies already process and control huge amounts of private data so the best approach to increased potential for them gaining more access is strong privacy protections.
I’ll add that the laws that have been implemented in various US states to mandate porn sites validate ID are the ones that have generated this new industry of digital checks and privacy concerns, not the under-16 laws. There are 25 states with these laws now, going back to 2022.
It doesn’t have to be perfectly enforced to have a significant positive impact though. Just the signal-effect to parents is enormous. If social media is banned for kinds under 15 (or 16, or whatever), it becomes orders of magnitude easier for parents with 10-year olds to not get the their own smartphone, tablet, etc. It becomes a lot easier to not cave to pressure of disabling parental controls on the same units.
Basically, the only way a 7-12 year old is getting addicted to a smartphone is if their parents supply one and don’t lock it down. When they do that, it’s likely due to external pressure of the type “all the other kids have it”, and they don’t want their kid to be the socially awkward one that’s left out. These kind of laws make it easier for parents to collectively agree to hold off on smartphones and social media.
My 7 year old great niece has already learned how to disable the parental controls on her tablet.
Or that elitist billionaires have been targeting them with propaganda campaigns for over a decade discouraging them from pursuing higher education and becoming part of the educated “elite.”
Idiocracy
Lots of comments about “who’s fault”, parenting, schools, microplastics etc. The combined evidence appears to be strongest for screen time and how that gets in the way of usual brain activities and challenges. That doesn’t detract from the need to improve parenting, diet, exercise, and reduce microplastics and other contaminants
Idiocracy rise
told the New York Post
Vice (which is right wing trash these days), quoting an interview with the NYPost. Mmmm. Credible.
