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 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
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.
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.
https://hdpulse.nimhd.nih.gov/data-portal/social/map?age=081&age_options=age25_1&demo=00006&demo_options=education_3&race=00&race_options=race_7&sex=0&sex_options=sexboth_1&socialtopic=020&socialtopic_options=social_6&statefips=00&statefips_options=area_states