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 barely even used a laptop at all until college, and it took me a solid two years to realize that having a laptop in class was too distracting. I switched exclusively to hand written notes and my GPA went from barely holding onto a 3.0 to nearly straight As. By grad school I was competing for top 5 class rank in a top 10 engineering program. It’s fucking nuts how much of a difference writing shit down by hand made in terms of my ability to retain information on first exposure.
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.
I basically stopped playing online games entirely once voice chat became the norm, and then a full on expectation/requirement. I absolutely hate it.
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.
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?
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
That would mean that we peaked at the millennials?
Scientists said our generation were getting food allergies because we weren’t getting exposed enough to things.
So we start stuffing our kids chock full of Pb&Js again and now they’re dumber. Great. Explain that one scientists!
These young people think that being conservative is forward looking and rebellious…they’re so so wrong. Sadly they’ll be the ones creating the policies for the foreseeable future, and their dumb choices will hunt those of us that still have a quite a bit of time in planet earth. Idiocracy wasn’t a movie but a documentary.
Idiocracy’s biggest mistake was claiming that intelligence is way more genetically heritable than it actually is.
