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 would mean that we peaked at the millennials?
Now, this is awkward. Horvath said many young people remain highly confident in their intelligence despite lower measured performance. Confidence isn’t the issue. Confidence without correction stalls improvement.
Maybe they got just bored from being a test subject.
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.
I agree that learning friction is essential.
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 tests in.
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.
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Don’t blame the kids, they grew up with a vastly different environment and influences. Poor bastards have had enough problems without this shit.
That’s not an accident.
That’s government policy.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 neuoscientist is just a phrenologist by another name. The kids are mostly alright, because they have a lot less lead in their drinking water and the internet to help find themselves. In a world with less third spaces and increasing poverty, they cannot obtain the opportunities that their forebears had, so their potential cannot flower.
The problem isn’t the internet, it is the fact that the aging adults are irresponsible dipshits who don’t give a crap about the young.
