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.
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
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.
I learned to type with all my fingers playing online FPS. No time to look away when you have to press T and then type out team directions.
Headsets ruined the game for me, also because of all the morons shit talking each others’ moms the whole time.
Yeah I played video games, but not computer games. There was a year or two when I was in elementary when I would play nothing but GMod and I got pretty good.
Then I lost PC access at some point and didn’t get another computer until I was 22.
The alternative to PC gaming was only a PS1 at the time. So PCs were really where the good games were exclusively at.
This was back in like 2003-2005. There were plenty of great console games that came out at that time and after.
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”.
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
Got a source for that claim?
I don’t know if there’s a place that collects all this data, but here are some issues I’ve seen in the US.
- Class sizes are growing
- 1 in 8 teachers are not actually certified to be teachers. Also of note in this data is that teacher attrition is awful right now - 4 out of 5 teachers who leave are doing it due to dissatisfaction or salary rather than retirement.
- Student misbehavior is up since 2019
- School funding is being diverted away from teachers towards non-teacher personnel and pension debt. Notably teacher salaries lag far behind the rate of inflation.
I mean, this is just a cursory exploration. I think someone with more time on their hands could find better sources than me.
Gen Z has managed something no modern generation pulled off before.
Whether it is true or not, i love how the article reflexively blames Gen Z. Like, did they invent Tiktok and brainrot? Did they ruin the school system? Did they put microplastics in the food and water?
Boomers invented Participation Trophies and then blamed Millennials for receiving them. I was a Millennial that would rather have failed then get one and the school system hated me for that
Than vs then is important here
It is nice of you to accommodate for their preferences.
No but they use these things even with warnings. And certainly use chatgpt where possible to avoid learning despite being warned.(lots of teachers have been very vocal about this). That’s a self made choice even with education about the choice.
kids in previous generations experimented with pipe bombs (which they didn’t invent the idea) and blew off their hands.
These kids were warned not to.
Yet not all kids play with pipe bombs and lose their hands. Hmm. Almost like kids are capable of individually accepting education about the choices they make.
So I guess no, you don’t have to invent the thing to be partial to be compliant if even fully certain in your own demise.
I partially agree with you. When i was young, some kids smoked even though the risk was quite clear. As a society, though, we banned kids from buying cigarettes because young people often make bad decisions. it’s not even their fault - it’s a prefrontal cortex thing. we can’t just say, ‘kids were warned’
clarification- when i say it’s not their fault i am referring to them being bad at making decisions. it is partially their fault about smoking, and partially due to them having poor impulse control and an intense need to conform.
Of course, because that’s what kids do. Kids have ALWAYS done stupid shit against the warnings of their parents/teachers. The difference is adults in the past haven’t usually given kids easy access to dangerous shit. And in the past the parents would normally be shamed for doing the dangerous shit that they tell kids not to do.
Use your example, pipe bombs: are they easily accessible just by reaching over and grabbing one off the kitchen counter? Because that’s how easy it is to grab a cell phone and use AI or TikTok. Do we have Superbowl ads for pipe bombs? Do we have celebrity endorsements for pipe bombs? Do adults happily use pipe bombs on the regular?
Use a different example: smoking or alcohol. While parents will use them both to varying degrees, we as a society have banned kids from doing them. We don’t just leave it up to kids to take our warning that both are bad for them.
Pipe bombs were easily made because of access to things in the kitchen.
And smokes are easy access as are alcohol… Some Kids mark the bottle to hide they were drinking it. Some Kids hide they smoke possibly even today. Reason why there’s incense.
And guns are also easily accessed. Some child related deaths in 80s and 90s in the US because guns weren’t locked up. Now a kid can get one from Walmart and shoot up a school.
But a lot of this can be shit patents with magical thinking that don’t know how to educate their kids and just leave it up to the legal age so the child gets overwhelmed with being an adult magically knowing all the things.
Cuz that doesn’t seem to be a factor here in the discussion.
And that’s an important one.
Maybe a lot of why the political climate is what it is is for one: lazy parenting. Includes not holding people accountable for making decisions they are capable of making for themselves and instead helicopter the shit out of it till lowest denominator kids learn to get away with manipulative shit like “you let me” excuses like you just did.
we done comparing all generations to their lowest common denominator?
Cuz I know not every child is getting up to this shit.
And I know every not child uses this bullshit excuse.
They learned pronouns easy enough. They can hear other words too to gain understanding of what the world is.
Are you seriously arguing that building a working pipe bomb is as easy as grabbing a cell phone off the counter? Seriously?
And everything you mentioned (bombs, guns, cigarettes, alcohol) are banned for children. They are not actively encouraged by nearly every segment of society.
My argument was that kids aren’t fully responsible for this, and that parents and adult society should take a large blame for it. You seem to agree that shitty parenting is the reason.
All people exist within and help create culture. It’s difficult to resist culture. As a young millennial, social media was everywhere and rapidly became how you interact with people. Many of us got hooked on it or other aspects of the internet. Hell I was reading cracked on my phone in high school after finishing my work instead of reading the book I brought (and yeah getting in trouble for it). It was normal. When I quit Facebook it came with social costs that weren’t intentionally applied, I just didn’t know about things that were happening because they were posted there.
Gen z is more hooked than any previous generation and at a younger age, just like millennials were. But the content has changed from texting peers to browsing the web to doomscrolling to doomscrolling without even needing to read. They bear some responsibility just as we did, but those of us who formed the culture they live in and built these tools also deserve some responsibility, as do the parents who haven’t been raising them to value education as much as ours did and who’ve been providing them with unlimited access to the devices.
I don’t think making pipe bombs is as addictive as using AI, but sure
people were saying this about millennials as well. in fact, James Flynn (for whom the Flynn effect is named) literally said that teenagers in 2009 were dumber than teenagers 30 years ago. call me when there’s a consensus from neuroscientists about this. for that matter, call me when standardised testing is a useful measure of intelligence
Between no child left behind and watching classes that teach you about things in the real world (homec, interviews, taxes, etc.) disappearing a year before I was supposed to take them in that era? I can understand that by measure of capability as prior generations understand it we are falling behind each generation. That was just when we started losing momentum.
Yeah. I’m a full grown adult and I don’t know shit about taxes, starting a business, marketing myself, being part of a community, … none of that, really. I feel like a lot of my recent adult life can be defined by self-teaching. Recently I’ve been teaching myself about radio technology. I’m planning on putting together some dishes/antennas to do stuff like read the GOES weather data and join the Meshtastic network.
I’ve wanted to help run a business my whole life, but never knew how to get started and still don’t. I don’t even know what I should open a business for… I could see myself doing consultancy for data engineering or analytical services, or perhaps a digital marketing gig. But again, no fucking idea what to do. I probably need to start with something small and less-risky if it fails, but everything seems like it’s high risk when your poor.
I don’t know. I’m hearing from college professors that kids are having trouble reading when they get to college now.
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.
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.
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.
Why does a 7 year old need a tablet at all?
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.
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.”
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.
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.
My boomer parents are lead infested and can’t do mental math worth a damn.
And it is important to memorize facts instead of looking them up every time because “true facts” become interconnected. You can find any info you want, true or false, but only true facts are interconnected. I recently had someone pull the “democrats supported slavery and the KKK” fact, which is historically true, but ignores that the republicans switched to supporting the bigots when the democrats starting supporting civil rights.
You actually need to retain information and be able to process that information to inoculate against misinformation.
Awww, but I loved seeing headlines how I, personally, as a millennial, am killing industries. I miss those days. ;_;
and darkness…
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Darkanti-vaxxers and flat earthers nodding
This is click bait
Let’s spin the ol’ wheel of rage bait distraction for today, is it gonna be “Gender A has it worse than gender B?” how about a little run on the infinite treadmill of “Celebrity says something controversial?” No no, I see we have “Generational blame for our miserable lives but no actual action or communication to address or fix it” on the menu today.
If your life/job/city sucks, it’s obviously {every human between the age of 16 and 25}'s fault, the only thing you can do to fix it is to spend the rest of your afternoon doomscrolling!
Why would you ever leave your couch?? That will never fix it!
CONSUME MORE SLOP
Not pictured:
The countless millions of people with their own, select worries and concerns and political ideologies each getting their own very special news stories fed directly to their phones or PC’s confirming that their misery is indeed the fault of [PEOPLE THEY HATE] and how even the people who are supposed to be smart are gobbling that slop down like piggies.
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?
Ah I see it’s time for our weekly “You’re miserable because of group-X” rage bait stupid fucking headlines.
I am far more concerned about our adults’ screen time, the people who are supposed to be running our goddamn fucking country are spending all their time scrolling and tweeting for attention and posting rage-bait and getting in trouble for irresponsible internet usage.
At least the kids growing up on the internet right now will have some kind of perspective and understanding how the shit works.
I mean, we still need to do something about algorithmic amplification of our worst feelings and impulses driving waves of insecure people into the arms of grifters and crumbling society broadly, but I want to BAN ADULTS FROM THE INTERNET FIRST.
I think it’s both. It’s bad for our future for kids to grow up with extreme body positivity issues and extreme social pressure that never lets up 24/7. It’s bad for our future for kids to see the President tweeting racist videos and violent images. It’s also bad for our present when our President does that.
I’m okay with banning the internet entirely. You need a license and proof that you’re using it for business, and make keyboards illegal.
I think you’ll probably find yourself mostly alone with that opinion.
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.
The kids:
I’ll just leave 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.
I know someone who’s a teacher and they complain almost daily about so much constant testing.
told the New York Post
Vice (which is right wing trash these days), quoting an interview with the NYPost. Mmmm. Credible.
Idiocracy rise
