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.
Don’t blame the kids, they grew up with a vastly different environment and influences. Poor bastards have had enough problems without this shit.
I would expect that leaded gasoline was responsible for the first gen stupider than their parents, but I have no data.
By the time most people start pumping gasoline, they are almost past the part of their lives they take many standardized exists in.
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.
That’s not an accident.
That’s government policy.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Garbage in, garbage out. COVID and screens were just accelerators that could’ve been managed and incorporated if we hadn’t been cutting the education budget to the bone for the last half dozen decades.
Teachers are worse quality, infrastructure is worse, and now the products of that steady decline are sending their kids (or their kids) back into a degraded system to show its “value” once again.
goes further than that, but yes
yeah, we have states poisoning the fuck out of their education system to try to make education for-profit. Administration is in the middle of trying to do the same.
its been largely neglected by almost every presidency, and attacked by the right. military will have problem recruiting everyone is going to college, and no wage slaves, so indirectly jobs/job sites are making harder to get hired on a fresh out of college level.
the military needs people to join because thats how they get people with no direction in life.
The uneducated are far easier to control. You take their cookies, then tell them it’s the foreigners. You tell them they’re as smart as anyone need be, and that those highly educated people are smug assholes who are stealing their cookies. If they just vote for you, you’ll make sure that they get their fair share of cookies. (Narrator: They did not get any cookies)
The government / project2025 crew is driving plans to do this, but it’s largely being worked at the state level.
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.
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.
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.
heh, always the prefrontal cortex
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
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 think if there is any true truth to it, it’s the systematic dismantling of the education system.
I do have an observation though, there is less need these days to push into the unknown. We’ve engineered everything to come out of the box so user friendly that if you don’t want to know about how something works, you can still get by just fine. Your car tells you you’re low on oil, and your tire is flat and it’s time to replace the transmission fluid. Wifi is ubiquitous. If you want to know about something, it’s available on demand. I’ve forgotten far more details about wars and countries that i’ll ever need to use in my life and if I ever need them, they’re right there 5 seconds to run a search or ask a local AI.
The people who are into tech and history and math are into it because they like it, for the most part machines are here to answer any questions you might have as long as you already have the broad strokes to know what you want to ask.
I’m GenX, My kids are both excelling at math and getting some semi-gentle prodding to get a little programming and art under their belts. I certainly don’t hold them in the house, but I don’t force them out either. There’s hardly any other kids out, they have access to social activities. Free ranging wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. You’re bored, you bike over to somebody’s house, they’re bored, their parents kick you all out, you ride your bikes down roads that are too busy, sneak into places you shouldn’t be just to break off the boredom.
The media is def all propaganda now, it has been for much longer than any of us would like to admit. I worked with a guy in the 00’s that had a CNN lies bumpersticker, I looked it up, yeah they kinda did on a few things. Every news carrier out there as at least some small agenda. TikTok, IG, FB are all full of it practically all you can do is pick some sources that don’t appear to be too bad (AP) and use a large pinch of salt when anything is reported.
who are raising these kids? The government is handing out propaganda. They are convincing the people that private run, for-profit schools are necessary. Everything is a grift. The public is dumbing down, but it’s not just the kids, they’re just the easiest metric to get
Recently saw a kid with a tablet glued to their pram so they couldn’t look away. Without the ability to study the faces of adults in real time, this child may develop an intellectual disability.
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?
Idiocracy is well on its way.
2028!
A leader who genuinely cares about their people, takes action, and relies on capable experts for advice? Gets my vote.
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.
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.
Recently I lost my place and idk how to move forward and find another. I only ended up here with guidance and now I have nothing
I don’t know. I’m hearing from college professors that kids are having trouble reading when they get to college now.
If its screens it should be effecting all the generations but at a certain point you stop taking standardized tests. Would be interesting for a societ if they kept on having them and you could see how cognitive decline worked.
If your brain was fully developed before screens came into existence, the screens couldn’t undo the learning you already had. However if you have spent your entire life viewing a screen and never learned to read, write, converse, dress yourself, etc and get to adulthood that way, your brain no longer has enough ability to fully erase that accumulated learning deficit. Many people under the age of 20 have large accumulated learning deficits. Unless babies, toddlers and young children are restricted from using them, the overall intelligence of the population will continue to decline. Apparently humans, in general, are very bad at learning from history. Through my life it was often asked how could Germans have allowed the Nazis to take over. We are seeing it in real time in the US. We also wondered how apparently advanced civilizations crumbled and their knowledge was lost. Again we are seeing in real time how that happens.
Screens is too reductive. Technology is a tool, and right now the way its used for children at home and in schools is causing a negative impact on their cognitive ability. Different generations use technology in different ways, and some generations haven’t used technology to replace social interaction but simply to aid it.
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
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.
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.
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.
Thanks, this is really interesting!
Not to mention contaminants like microplastics and Pfas
