It points to poorly designed and unproven "educational technology," or EdTech as the potential culprit. Rather than suggesting a luddite regression, it merely calls for proving the efficacy of EdTech prior to large rollouts.
Given the "reading wars" dragged on for over a century, I'm not optimistic this will be resolved anytime soon.
I actually took it out of my reply below, but agree that “curriculum format” is much to blame. Thankfully our school district largely did away with screens this year (last year there was a huge parent outcry regarding the policy). They used to do everything on screens, to the point where they had to log into portals at home to play garbage “learning” games. Mind you, I’m talking about grades k-3. It was abhorrent. A lot of that was driven by the curriculum program they adopted from what I understand.
Thankfully they only get 30 min/day on the laptops now. I’m sure the teachers still use their smart screens (considering the chalkboards are covered in static material now), but somehow that seems less bad.
Indeed - all the graphs in that link show lower test scores for longer "in school cpu use". But the longitudinal comparison (2012-2018) show almost no change (except for zero CPU use, which they didn't really explain.)
> None of the comments so far are engaging with the OP, whose written testimony was included in the article:
Because of the extremely inflammatory title, perhaps? Replace "Gen Z" with a skin color or a religion and you'd get instantly banned from hacker news.
Also, from the article, it seems to directly contradict your comment:
> This conversation feels uncomfortable because it doesn’t offer villains or easy fixes. Horvath summed it up bluntly during his testimony. “A sad fact our generation has to face is this: Our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.” His recommendation focused on restraint, dialing back screens in schools, and restoring depth before the next generation is doomed.
This article is a rehash of a New York Post article that quotes Dr. Jared Horvarth who testified before Congress. His testimony [1] references PISA, PIRLS and TIMSS scores.
Edit: His testimony concludes:
> This is not a debate about rejecting technology. It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works.
> Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital
expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them.
> Federal policy can restore balance by demanding evidence, protecting children’s
developmental needs, and ensuring that innovation serves learning rather than attention
capture.
> Our responsibility is not to maximize screen exposure, but to maximize the cognitive
capacity and long-term flourishing of the next generation.
I’m sure this is true. Much of millennials, and I mean older and younger, have been starting to hit that inflection point in recent years where we are the leaders in the professional and familial worlds. We’re now sandwiched by adults who are both younger, without kids, and older, aging out. It affords one additional abilities to reflect and sometimes to come to perennial conclusions or faux wisdom; things that we think are now true but have always been (because we all have main character syndrome).
That being said there appears to be a difference in attention spans that I find unnerving, especially as a parent of a Gen Alpha. I could also be suffering the same inability to see my youth through the eyes I have now, but I definitely do not recall the lack of attention that they experience.
What if, after few generations we realise that the test system we are using all along to test the intelligence were too technical and didn't consider the actual human intelligence?
P.S. Every generation thinks that next generation is dumber than the previous generation in some area and still we are making progress with every generation.
Can you support that last clause? I havent witnessed “progress” being produced yet by the cohort that grew up with tablets and Chromebooks. And I don’t hate them. I do feel bad for them, though. They didn’t choose their upbringing.
> The declines cut across attention, memory, literacy, numeracy, executive function, and general IQ.
Problem can be with the tests. Are they testing the correct thing? Are there any increases with other tests? Are there any functions they haven't tested?
Maybe they're faster, quick-thinking multitaskers. Their brains are augmented with always-online smart devices. They have constant access to knowledge and have better educational materials. They must be smart in a new way.
Why “must”? To accept your argument as written, it sounds like you would consider it impossible for the typical intelligence to decline from one point in time to a future point in time.
I tend to believe the argument made in the article because when I see someone young try to fact-find, the effort usually begins and ends with a Google AI overview. They then accept that unilaterally and are incapable of independently analyzing or verifying what it claims. Hell, they don’t even click its meager “citations”!
Multiple studies have found that Gen-Z is more gullible to scams.
All of this points to critical thinking weakness and learned laziness. A belief that everything should be easy and simple. I think it even explains some of their common political beliefs in both parties: absolutist opinions are more popular than ever, rejecting nuance.
Personally, I think Millennials are just as dumb, but we had the benefit of catching the tail end of analog and the last bit of actual reality in our formative years before technology took over our lives. Our behavior and habits just got worse after that.
Sounds like you agree with the article, but are just quibbling over what "dumb" means, interpreting it to mean raw biological brain ability rather than test results or academic achievement.
There are many things to point at and blame without evidence. Is it increased class sizes, or teachers having to move from teaching to managing classrooms, or lack of arithmetic skills built on rote learning of multiplication tables replaced with “methods”, or maybe, just maybe, it’s all the Teletubbies fault.
This isn’t directly related to the article but if Jared Cooney Horvath argues that learning “depends on sustained attention and interaction with other people”, where would that place some of the newer schools that rely a lot on AI to teach and hire human guides or coaches instead of teachers?
The next generation will grow up where AI was always a thing. I do not think it the existence of that easy button is going to lead to cognitive capability improving (at population levels, individuals will of course vary). That more we can offload to machines, the more we will.
I find that the rare of smart vs dumb people in companies, even tech companies is also pretty scary nowadays. it wasnt perfect in the late 80-90 but execs usually could do the work of everyone, and also manage the workforce. nowadays most execs are placed and don't know of care how their products work, unless it's a startup.
the reason it's interesting is that the lack of understanding and skill results in a "bourgeoisie" class in the workforce, and that isn't correlated to skill, amounts of labor or even cognitivity.
This tends to reduce the utilization of 'overwhelmingly' smart people, who are put to crappy tasks just to make money and ends meet.
There’s already a turn around. It’s the Covid policies at play and refusal to hold back failing students. My local district is already starting to see test scores improve
They’re just adapting to be better at teaching to the tests. Those tests are the yardstick which grade the schools, and the school admins and teachers must pass them sufficiently or else they’ll be replaced with others who will. So there has always been shenanigans where they exploit their foreknowledge of the test contents to help kids be prepared for very specific things, instead of teaching them thinking skills.
Tests that legitimately are attempting to measure the thinking skills of individuals aren’t going to see improvements, I predict.
Seriously, I have no idea why the onus is on the generation, the framing should be "education is massively underfunded, teachers are abandoned with ever increasing class sizes and ever decreasing agency, and kids are left with smartphones to fend for themselves in an environment where they may be shot and killed at any moment".
Are you sure about the underfunding piece? Education funding is a larger share of GDP and higher in inflation-adjusted dollars than any time in the past. Maybe the funding is just poorly managed.
Bravo! We’ve collectively cannibalized our ability to vault our children to new highs so we can continue to subsidize billionaires’ nihilistic destruction of our planet under the guise of freedom and economic progress.
Perhaps, but there’s an explicit measurable link between weeks of school closure and loss of academic performance. It may not capture the whole picture, but COVID was a huge driver of the problem.
I can't speak for others, but I do know that my screen time is filled with this news feed and engineering or other STEM videos. I could never study, it just didn't work for me. But I have a good memory so watching videos tangential to my field helped. I ended up with straight As in my last years of uni, supported by 40+ hours/week of YouTube. Still not sure if that's accounting for 2x speed.
There's a lot of nuance to this. They should consider what we're "staring" at. Is it AI slop content like our parents seem to enjoy? Or more than that? Likewise for social media: maybe consider why in a society where it's prohibitively expensive to do anything and there's a loss of third spaces people are turning to online connections. And beyond that, connections to people from different backgrounds and locations. I can talk to somebody from the other side of the planet online without effort. We can learn of eachothers' hardships and experiences instantly. I think this got shown very well when rednote happened and American + Chinese teens/young adults mixed together en masse for the first time.
Other people have mentioned this to me — that Gen Z and younger millennials are likely to fix you in a stare when answering a question.
Bit of a rant incoming:
This is a Gen X teaching failure. As kids we were taught to face front and look at the teacher when they were teaching, and in the era of fears of poorer attention, "attention-focussed" teachers have mistakenly extended this idea that looking the teacher in the eyes when answering is better, when it is worse.
The teacher thinks they have the pupil's attention: they do! But the pupil is supposed to be answering the question: that is where their attention should be.
Kids who do now have trouble directing their attention are not going to do better at answering the question this way, because they are wasting it. As long as the kid is making an attempt to answer the question, teachers should let them stare at the ceiling or a blank wall.
Some of it seems to be education-related though, and parents had insufficient influence there. The Chromebook generations are just handed a device and told this is how we do school.
But I’m not really sure how much is education and how much is everything else. We don’t have a control group of kids who have EdTech educations but don’t have brains addled by TikTok (etc) into having no attention span and manipulated by algorithms into having whatever beliefs best optimize “engagement.”
Everyone can see that GenZ isn’t all right, everyone knows that children shouldn’t be raised by makeup tutorials, Jake and Logan Paul, and now ChatGPT, but we as a society are doing little to stop it. And what little we do (social media bans for example) are incomplete and have to be questioned on whether they have bad consequences for adult freedom and privacy.
Their early-years and kindergarten teachers and teaching assistants are a bit more likely to be Millennials, and I suspect that is a factor.
If you assume that the slow drift in poor teaching started with Gen X teachers, then what Millennials would have lost first was some of the communication of the the joy of learning and metacognition, which matters when you are the first generation whose attention span is taking a battering.
It is perhaps harder to teach what you had fewer opportunities to learn.
The amount of hours devoted to sports in US schools is unbelievable. I have friends who are ALWAYS busy with either training or leagues, including holidays. Most of these kids will not be athletes. I understand the team building skills, maybe the monetary benefit of scholarships, but investing so much time and money in something of so little value for 99% of kids once they become adults, doesn’t make sense. I will certainly not be doing that with my kids.
> The amount of hours devoted to sports in US schools is unbelievable... Most of these kids will not be athletes.
The same could be said for a lot of other subjects too.
Physical activity/sports has far, far more benefits than just team building and scholarships. Given that a lot of the conversation seems to be implicating screentime in the decline, I'd guess that if we swapped 10% of school screen time for 10% more sports, we'd probably have a better outcome as a society.
I say this as someone who has done lots of computers and screentime my entire life, and very little sport.
Texas would finally pass it's yearly vote to secesed.
While I agree with you, it's so far and away from anything that could actually happen that I despair over what could be done. It seems like my children's schools change their evaluation criteria every other year to some "new" and "evidence-based" criteria. Do the kids do any different work? No. Do that get evaluated by different standards? Not really. I wouldn't call changing "pass" to "meets expectations" and fail to "not on track for success" to be a substantive change. Forcing equilateral, rectilinear wooden dowels into orifices of constant radius doesn't change the fact that we're playing a stupid game.
Yeah, we fucked this one up. No shade but older US millennials (I am one) are the worst parents. TERRIBLE. Idk why but we are. It’s like none of us born in the 80s learned from the everyone before us how not to be:/ But we were the TV generation & it’s interesting to see how our version of social media has impacted our parenting.
I tend to find all sorts of generalizations like this so useless. Like, this thing you said seems totally random to me. I know lots of "elder millennial" parents and lots of parents of other ages, and I see lots of variation between parents in "not saying no", but I don't see any correlation by age... Regional and political cultural differences are way more correlated with things like this IMO.
Millenials spend time with their kids, way more than previous generations. Especially fathers.
I don't know if you've met people, but most people are terrible! And now these poor role models are spending extra time with young impressionable minds! /s
Another in a long series of such articles over the thousands of years. One must assume these are written to compensate for the nearly universal experience of the older people being unable to operate all the stuff the kids do as easily as breathing. Totally plausible than a digital and networked society changes the way highly smart people develop the gifts of intelligence; not plausible that all these damn kids are dumb.
Handwringing over standardized test scores dropping due to societal changes altering the shape of intelligence has been a thing since the 1970s. Back then it was the SATs.
western "mass" schooling started in 789, over a thousand years ago, not "thousands".
actual decline started last century (that's for a hundred).
Older people aren't actually "boomers with everything handed to them", it's just you in 30y - more experience, more depth, and slight drop in cognitivity.
for computer science, I find it interesting that almost every Gen z can use and talk about concepts but does not understand how a computer works (be it transistors, kernel, or memory allocation for example).
With AI we all know this will get worse, and it already does. it's not just the prompting - AIs can and will return information with the upmost confidence, even if wrong. A lot of critical thinking is needed, which cannot be found by re-querying or using a search engine (that does the same thing) - information isn't cognitivity.
Did you intend to point out that "generation" is a singular noun while "their" is a plural pronoun? If so, I'd say that "their" is actually correct and the best way to write this. I think you could also say "its" and that would also be technically correct, but it would be significantly less clear. The current construction is the clearest way to say that the individuals that make up the group, in aggregate, are dumber than their parents, in aggregate.
Well, considering Gen Z is a group of people who has parents, their works just fine. "my Mom" "my Dad" ... parents are usually referred to as entities the child has. And Gen Z is a plurality of people.
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/media/doc...
It points to poorly designed and unproven "educational technology," or EdTech as the potential culprit. Rather than suggesting a luddite regression, it merely calls for proving the efficacy of EdTech prior to large rollouts.
Given the "reading wars" dragged on for over a century, I'm not optimistic this will be resolved anytime soon.
https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/the-science-of-reading-vs...
Thankfully they only get 30 min/day on the laptops now. I’m sure the teachers still use their smart screens (considering the chalkboards are covered in static material now), but somehow that seems less bad.
This link shows the longitudinal drop in 2022 for the US - almost assuredly pandemic related https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38. Otherwise the scores are higher than ever.
But even in your link, you can see the plateau and subsequent decline prior to COVID.
The pandemic just exacerbated an already existing problem.
Because of the extremely inflammatory title, perhaps? Replace "Gen Z" with a skin color or a religion and you'd get instantly banned from hacker news.
Also, from the article, it seems to directly contradict your comment:
> This conversation feels uncomfortable because it doesn’t offer villains or easy fixes. Horvath summed it up bluntly during his testimony. “A sad fact our generation has to face is this: Our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.” His recommendation focused on restraint, dialing back screens in schools, and restoring depth before the next generation is doomed.
No it doesn't. My comment was based on his findings.
Edit: His testimony concludes:
> This is not a debate about rejecting technology. It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works.
> Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them.
> Federal policy can restore balance by demanding evidence, protecting children’s developmental needs, and ensuring that innovation serves learning rather than attention capture.
> Our responsibility is not to maximize screen exposure, but to maximize the cognitive capacity and long-term flourishing of the next generation.
[1] Written Testimony, Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, PhD, MEd, Neuroscientist and Educator Before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation https://www.commerce.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/media/doc...
That being said there appears to be a difference in attention spans that I find unnerving, especially as a parent of a Gen Alpha. I could also be suffering the same inability to see my youth through the eyes I have now, but I definitely do not recall the lack of attention that they experience.
P.S. Every generation thinks that next generation is dumber than the previous generation in some area and still we are making progress with every generation.
Problem can be with the tests. Are they testing the correct thing? Are there any increases with other tests? Are there any functions they haven't tested?
Maybe they're faster, quick-thinking multitaskers. Their brains are augmented with always-online smart devices. They have constant access to knowledge and have better educational materials. They must be smart in a new way.
I tend to believe the argument made in the article because when I see someone young try to fact-find, the effort usually begins and ends with a Google AI overview. They then accept that unilaterally and are incapable of independently analyzing or verifying what it claims. Hell, they don’t even click its meager “citations”!
Multiple studies have found that Gen-Z is more gullible to scams.
All of this points to critical thinking weakness and learned laziness. A belief that everything should be easy and simple. I think it even explains some of their common political beliefs in both parties: absolutist opinions are more popular than ever, rejecting nuance.
A few overwhelmingly smart people who had that as a hobby, and the very sad rest.
the reason it's interesting is that the lack of understanding and skill results in a "bourgeoisie" class in the workforce, and that isn't correlated to skill, amounts of labor or even cognitivity.
This tends to reduce the utilization of 'overwhelmingly' smart people, who are put to crappy tasks just to make money and ends meet.
Tests that legitimately are attempting to measure the thinking skills of individuals aren’t going to see improvements, I predict.
We, the older generations, have failed them.
Edit for clarity: some states were fully remote for over a year, and I’m including partial remote weeks here.
There's a lot of nuance to this. They should consider what we're "staring" at. Is it AI slop content like our parents seem to enjoy? Or more than that? Likewise for social media: maybe consider why in a society where it's prohibitively expensive to do anything and there's a loss of third spaces people are turning to online connections. And beyond that, connections to people from different backgrounds and locations. I can talk to somebody from the other side of the planet online without effort. We can learn of eachothers' hardships and experiences instantly. I think this got shown very well when rednote happened and American + Chinese teens/young adults mixed together en masse for the first time.
Bit of a rant incoming:
This is a Gen X teaching failure. As kids we were taught to face front and look at the teacher when they were teaching, and in the era of fears of poorer attention, "attention-focussed" teachers have mistakenly extended this idea that looking the teacher in the eyes when answering is better, when it is worse.
The teacher thinks they have the pupil's attention: they do! But the pupil is supposed to be answering the question: that is where their attention should be.
Kids who do now have trouble directing their attention are not going to do better at answering the question this way, because they are wasting it. As long as the kid is making an attempt to answer the question, teachers should let them stare at the ceiling or a blank wall.
That's what I was referring to. Not the Gen Z stare.
But I’m not really sure how much is education and how much is everything else. We don’t have a control group of kids who have EdTech educations but don’t have brains addled by TikTok (etc) into having no attention span and manipulated by algorithms into having whatever beliefs best optimize “engagement.”
Everyone can see that GenZ isn’t all right, everyone knows that children shouldn’t be raised by makeup tutorials, Jake and Logan Paul, and now ChatGPT, but we as a society are doing little to stop it. And what little we do (social media bans for example) are incomplete and have to be questioned on whether they have bad consequences for adult freedom and privacy.
Their early-years and kindergarten teachers and teaching assistants are a bit more likely to be Millennials, and I suspect that is a factor.
If you assume that the slow drift in poor teaching started with Gen X teachers, then what Millennials would have lost first was some of the communication of the the joy of learning and metacognition, which matters when you are the first generation whose attention span is taking a battering.
It is perhaps harder to teach what you had fewer opportunities to learn.
The same could be said for a lot of other subjects too.
Physical activity/sports has far, far more benefits than just team building and scholarships. Given that a lot of the conversation seems to be implicating screentime in the decline, I'd guess that if we swapped 10% of school screen time for 10% more sports, we'd probably have a better outcome as a society.
I say this as someone who has done lots of computers and screentime my entire life, and very little sport.
While I agree with you, it's so far and away from anything that could actually happen that I despair over what could be done. It seems like my children's schools change their evaluation criteria every other year to some "new" and "evidence-based" criteria. Do the kids do any different work? No. Do that get evaluated by different standards? Not really. I wouldn't call changing "pass" to "meets expectations" and fail to "not on track for success" to be a substantive change. Forcing equilateral, rectilinear wooden dowels into orifices of constant radius doesn't change the fact that we're playing a stupid game.
I don't know if you've met people, but most people are terrible! And now these poor role models are spending extra time with young impressionable minds! /s
actual decline started last century (that's for a hundred).
Older people aren't actually "boomers with everything handed to them", it's just you in 30y - more experience, more depth, and slight drop in cognitivity.
for computer science, I find it interesting that almost every Gen z can use and talk about concepts but does not understand how a computer works (be it transistors, kernel, or memory allocation for example).
With AI we all know this will get worse, and it already does. it's not just the prompting - AIs can and will return information with the upmost confidence, even if wrong. A lot of critical thinking is needed, which cannot be found by re-querying or using a search engine (that does the same thing) - information isn't cognitivity.
Can you give an example of that?
"Kids These Days" don't even know how to operate a perfectly standard smartphone without help.
I would argue that its a function of raw effort in varying domains.
Hope for grammar is fast fading, anyway.
For reference,
they're. contraction. Gen Z and they are parents. Is not what was intended.
there. location. Over there.
"The class tossed their graduation caps in the air" strikes me as less clumsy than its alternatives.