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.
As a millenial who went through the shite by the media about how much of a snowflake we are by getting offended with everything, frivolous for ordering avocado toasts for breakfasts, and clueless and unequipped when it comes to working, I ask: “who raised us?” I remember the parents’ moral panic on videogames and cartoons in the 1990s and 2000s. Many kids of my generation weren’t let out because the boomer and Gen X parents were made afraid by the constant news cycle of serial killers and high crime rate. And they wonder why we’re so sheltered? Now, the media run by older generations are taking potshots at Gen Z claiming they are dumber. Even if that is the case, who are the ones who raised Gen Z to be constantly glued to the phone screen and watching brain rotting contents that led to lower IQ?
The next time the media complains such and such generation is behaving a certain way or being dumb, even if scientific study says so, ask yourself, who are raising these kids?