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.
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.
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.
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.
The article states this effect is visible across 80 countries, which suggests its maybe less about policy, if true.
Ah, you’re right. Don’t know how I missed that part but it at least means my statements were a bit myopic compared to the point he was trying to make.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Awww, but I loved seeing headlines how I, personally, as a millennial, am killing industries. I miss those days. ;_;
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?
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.
Don’t blame the kids, they grew up with a vastly different environment and influences. Poor bastards have had enough problems without this shit.
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.
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.
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.
