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.
That’s possible but also quite possibly attributable to the constant erosion of our schools and drift in curriculum. The last decade has seen enormous reductions in education quality.
Gen Z has managed something no modern generation pulled off before.
Whether it is true or not, i love how the article reflexively blames Gen Z. Like, did they invent Tiktok and brainrot? Did they ruin the school system? Did they put microplastics in the food and water?
people were saying this about millennials as well. in fact, James Flynn (for whom the Flynn effect is named) literally said that teenagers in 2009 were dumber than teenagers 30 years ago. call me when there’s a consensus from neuroscientists about this. for that matter, call me when standardised testing is a useful measure of intelligence
These young people think that being conservative is forward looking and rebellious…they’re so so wrong. Sadly they’ll be the ones creating the policies for the foreseeable future, and their dumb choices will hunt those of us that still have a quite a bit of time in planet earth. Idiocracy wasn’t a movie but a documentary.
Idiocracy’s biggest mistake was claiming that intelligence is way more genetically heritable than it actually is.
That would mean that we peaked at the millennials?
Scientists said our generation were getting food allergies because we weren’t getting exposed enough to things.
So we start stuffing our kids chock full of Pb&Js again and now they’re dumber. Great. Explain that one scientists!
