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.
So, I tried looking for any sort for any write-up, journal, or article in which Horvath details his findings or data analysis. I haven’t found anything except articles referencing what he said in front of the Senate. Without that, it’s impossible to tell how he determined causality.
Without completely rejecting his correlation to screen time, here are some changes I noticed between my time as a middle schooler and the past decade that I’ve now worked in public education:
- More advanced topics: 6th graders are now learning about photovoltaics. Not just listing it as a renewable energy, but the actual functions of photons interacting with elections. This extends to many topics that were omitted or unheard of for millennials.
- Advanced academics: classes that I’d taken as electives or as part of an advanced placement program in high school have been moved down to, or are offered in, middle school.
- Frequency of testing: when I started in public education nearly 10 years ago, students were given more standardized tests per year than there were days in a school year. And this didn’t account for the district, department, or teacher-assigned tests and quizzes. The number of standardized tests have gone down a bit somewhat recently, but those dark times still affect the average standardized testing scores for the entire generation.
- Less informed teachers: remember that part about more advanced topics entering the lessons and more advanced classes being offered earlier? Well, while the lessons changed, many of the teachers didn’t. That meant that teachers with outdated knowledge and concepts were attempting to teach concepts beyond their own understanding. For a while there, while older teachers tended to have better classroom control, their students’ test scores were often crap compared to the younger teachers. And due to seniority and campus behavioral expectations, departmental meetings were often led by the older teachers, who emphasized control. The belief for a while was that if you could engage the students, their test scores would go up; not if you were engaging them with the wrong information, though!
- Increased stressors: younger and younger students were expected to interact with increasingly advanced technology. What went from my friends and me sharing games we programmed on our TI-83s turned into young students sending nudes from their borrowed laptops. Students were given power they weren’t yet able to comprehend, because horniness is a powerful driver to kids who are being denied sex education. This led to them stressing out over the uncontrollable nature of data transfer.
- Inability to escape the past: teachers used to have to go into an office, and search through files in folders within cabinets to learn about a student’s past behavior. A search like this was usually preempted by a student showing concerning behavior. Now, every incident is stored in a quickly accessible database. One that many teachers will look through to form opinions about their students before ever meeting them. This disadvantages students genuinely trying to reform their image, or escape biases based on long-since-passed choices.
Without an understanding of what Horvath was studying, I can only focus on the contributing factors that I saw. And based on those, we fucking failed those kids. All things considered, I’d say that Gen Z is performing pretty well considering how fucked they were from the start.
Gen Z has a lot of shit stacked against them. I’m glad the article doesn’t go “blaming” Gen Z for “being dumber”, but instead is focusing on the fact it’s a parenting failure. COVID era learning difficulties, constantly being bombarded with tech designed to suck out their soul, AI being everywhere for their college age life, etc.
As a Millennial, I’ve seen the blame game. I only hope we come out of this spiral as a society.
This was an obvious result from COVID closing schools. Every expert in child development was saying this would happen.
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
At the end of middle school, I got a participation trophy for the state science fair, which was a mandatory requirement for graduating 8th grade. It was the only “award” I got at the graduation superlatives assembly.
The kicker? I actually got an exception for the science fair because I missed 6 weeks of school while almost dying from MRSA pneumonia. This is my millennial villain origin story.
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.
I disagree with the prefrontal cortex being entirely at fault as there are kids out there that are entirely capable of avoiding dumb stuff and do take warnings. There are also adults entirely capable of doing exactly the same shit while having a prefrontal cortex entirely developed.
We only take notice of the ones who don’t because they are the ones who make the news cycle and click baits such as this article we’re all commenting on here. Another thing we’re all addicted to and is not entirely only affecting children but also adults alike.
I think you are also touching on impulse control which does get into mental health area which is another topic overlooked area when parenting and acknowledgment in what kind of limits should be nuanced from kid to kid. They are individuals. Not a hive mind.
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.
you’re so convinced that all it takes is forbidding it so we run a society of forbidding children from phones for fear they can’t even monitor themselves rather than educate? Is that your solution?
cuz of the ‘you invented it and there for i can’t help myself’ ? Are you really buying into that shit excuse?
all because of a click bait article?
Cuz this is the precise lazy parent approach rather than educating them I’m talking about here.
Part of battling that isn’t obtusely buying into these kind of stupid manipulative excuses and rolling up your sleeves getting involved with the nuances.
I have no idea what the fuck you just said in this insane rambling.
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
It doesn’t. That line makes it feel that way, though. See https://lemmy.world/comment/22058240
Oh ok so you suggest a society to ban kids from using phones for the fact they can’t control themselves then. What a Wonderful lazy solution.
No. The problem is that kids have nothing else to do. The only fun thing left is the phone.
They can’t go alone and play out there, they may get hit by a car or their parents might get in trouble. They have to always be supervised by an adult, but there are almost no places with adults to watch for the kids, they have to bring their dedicated parent. And parents have to work way too many hours, they don’t have time to watch the kid play for all the time the kid needs to play.
Furthermore, everything that is fun to kids is illegal. “No skating here”, “no playing with a ball here”. Where can kids play? They don’t have a car to go to a remote place where playing is allowed. They should have areas where they can play relatively close to home.
And I say this as a European. In America all these problems are 10x worse, I can’t imagine what that would do to a kid. Maybe the suburbanites can play in their lawns. But the ones in cities are out of luck.
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.
Presidency after presidency education has been getting cut while the war budget continue to grow.
Also I have a feeling the pandemic contributed to a lot of kids being held back in learning but not really being held back in school and pushed along to the next grade.
Not to mention contaminants like microplastics and Pfas
This is directly tied to the No Child Left Behind Act passing 25 years ago. It’s been a coordinated effort to dumb down the populace and make them less informed
I’ve heard of rural US homeschool kids entering their teens who can’t read or write.
It’s not just homeschooled kids…
The article suggests strongly screens are responsible for this phenomena of ‘generational dumbness’. Intelligence is something extremely hard to measure but every kind of measure all going down at once is a good indicator something is going on.
There’s maybe less investigation into whether covid is a factor here, though that would seem a bit relevant as well, if only to rule it out. There’s no discussion if its a specific phone behavior that causes this.
No Child Left Behind was replaced by Obama with Every Student Aucceeds Act. It’s mostly been about standardizing primary education so a kid doesn’t miss fundamental topics if the change districts or states in elementary school.
goes further than that, but yes
That would mean that we peaked at the millennials?
This is actually kind of surprising since some of the more pervasive poisons (like lead) were reduced. I wonder if some others were introduced that we’ll learn about later…
I know people like to jump right to screens and devices and “social media”, but it is fairly instructive that some fairly prominent people in tech had set some boundaries on their kids’ use of such things…
https://www.thelist.com/677684/the-real-reason-tech-moguls-dont-let-their-kids-on-social-media/
Also - when I read that studies show that people tend to absorb the content of actual, physical books better than reading an ebook, I tend to seek out the hardcopy of a book for important topics I need to really understand.
That’s not an accident.
That’s government policy.
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.
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.
I have read the article. While yes, most of it is neutral and factual, the opening paragraph colours all of it towards a certain message by saying “Gen Z has managed to”, implying Gen Z is responsible for it - which it most definitely isn’t, we are nowhere near being decision makers today, let alone 10-20 years ago when we were meant to learn and develop these skills.
I am a teacher, and also part of Gen Z. Believe it or not, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone more in favour of restricting access to social media for kids or raising standards than me; the fact of the matter is, however, that we didn’t cause these problems. It’s not like we are happy about this either.
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.”
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.
I don’t know. I’m hearing from college professors that kids are having trouble reading when they get to college now.
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?
I always bring this point up when somebody older goes on about “Participation Trophies” - Who invented them?! I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t the kids who were getting them. The same damn people that complain about them are the people that brought them into reality.
Both can be true at the same time.
The result and the thing that caused it, doesn’t change the fact that the result would be there tho.
I might be wrong but I think this might be more of a failing of the US education system than an across the board decline world wide. Although I do think millenials but much more so Gen Z and Alpha are adversly affected by social media than the generations before by tv.
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
You may have a point, but I’m pretty sure Flynn and Horvath are talking about the same phenomenon. Flynn is talking about teens in 2008. Horvath is talking about a phenomenon that started in the mid-2000s. The problem is that because newspeople are obsessed with using generation-based language now, they would rather insert nonsensical implications into their reporting than actually give the starting date Horvath uses in his written testimony.
To be fair, even Horvath brings up “Gen Z” in his speech - but he’s bringing it up to a bunch of politicians in a speech. At least he doesn’t bring this specific framing up in his written testimony.
To be fair, I might be wrong.
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.
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.
At least the kids growing up on the internet right now will have some kind of perspective and understanding how the shit works.
I don’t think this is necessarily the case. If stuff is too abstracted away for people to grasp, they can use it, but don’t really understand it. Like reports of people saying that college kids cannot interact with things like folders. Some of them are so digitally native, that they really lost the understanding of it.
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.
Republican policies are working! This is a US centric phenomena, right? Not something happening in china?
I would also say this is what happens when public transit is largely unfunded
After reading to the end of the article, I appreciated this subtle joke.
It is weird that smartphones seem to have this effect. Its also weird the explanation isn’t fully clear, as in, can devices be locked down in some way to prevent this?
