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.
also the fact that thier obsession with YOUtube, and ticktok rotted thier brains.
I think that’s likely. We’ve spent an entire generation of the world’s most brilliant engineers on optimizing the addictive nature of social platforms - all to serve more ads. It fries people’s brains just like slot machines do.
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.
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
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”.
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.
I basically stopped playing online games entirely once voice chat became the norm, and then a full on expectation/requirement. I absolutely hate it.
Same here. Got into sim racing offline a little but mostly stopped, no interest in being yelled at by 13 year olds. Also got real jobs, life’s and a kid to raise.
But never bought a headset or the games that needed them.
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.
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.
I mean, this is just a cursory exploration. I think someone with more time on their hands could find better sources than me.
Not to mention contaminants like microplastics and Pfas