Gen Z Is the First Generation Dumber Than Their Parents, Neuroscientist Claims
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For the first time ever, a new generation is officially dumber than the previous one. Congrats, Gen Z, you really did it.

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.

  • fartographer@lemmy.world
    71·
    1 day ago

    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.