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.
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.