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.
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 kids are messed up when they get to school - we can’t exclusively blame the education system.
I think that people don’t have time to parent their kids. Everyone i know is stressed and over-committed. People are forced to go back to work way too early in their kid’s development.i live in a country where you get 55% of your income for about a year as parental leave - but even that is not enough. People of my parents’ generation used to toilet train at 18mo because it used to be possible to support a family on one income. that is a rarity these days
Give y’all one guess who’s been defunding more and more, making education more of a hostile worklace, and making it harder for parents to be around or prep their kids.
Here is basically the same article from 2009
It may not be every generation, but this certainly isn’t the first
Computer science isn’t a fair example to use. Computer science still uses low-level technical skills that has recently been abstracted out from most consumer technogy
That’s like the trucking industry sounding the alarm about driving skills because fewer people are driving. Yeah, if the population isn’t naturally using those skills in daily life they won’t be as good at them
We’re not going to rearrange all of how society uses technology just to give the ~1% of younger people going into CS a head start again
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.