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.
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.