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.
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.