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.

> 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.

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.)

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.

Evidence based policies are something we need more of in general.

The reading wars are a great example of founder effects distorting fields. Early educators supported whole word so it just “stuck” in spite of science and abundant real world evidence.

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.

Yeah but now the experts say it too.

And, sometimes, they are right.

Perhaps they were right then as well in some sense.

I don't see a lot of "Gen Z sucks" out there, but there definitely is some. Most of what I see is articles blaming the Boomers for everything, and the Boomers having it easy. But AFAICT, my own Gen X is in a better position than Boomers were. For example, I bought my first house in 2000, so had similar appreciation as the boomers over a much shorter period.

American politics seems to be all about blaming problems on other groups. It's most obvious in the anti-immigration rhetoric, but the generational rhetoric is very similar.

Enjoy the ride? There was no shortage of "Millenials suck because XYZ" articles for the last few decades. Thousands of articles written accusing us of being child-like right up until we had grey hair and kids of our own.

My experience in higher education so far suggests the affluent are not immune to these same trends.

It's not "lumpy", but AI definitely made the spread (distribution) of scores wider. See the last chart from: https://infographics.economist.com/2026/20260822_WOC963/

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.

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.

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".

We, the older generations, have failed them.

They sat at home for over a year during COVID doing busywork, during key developmental years, which probably had a bigger impact.

Edit for clarity: some states were fully remote for over a year, and I’m including partial remote weeks here.

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.

Gen Alpha will likely have a distribution like we used to have before mass schooling.

A few overwhelmingly smart people who had that as a hobby, and the very sad rest.

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

It's only getting worse. Just look at reading scores or the recent pisa report.

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.

I worry that as a smart person you are too optimistic about what your fellow youths are staring at. TikTok and its copycat short vertical video sites are primarily full of content designed to make you dumber, whether it’s prurient content, simplistic and stupid political/cultural takes, or fads. And it of course comes with a joke of a promise that if you waste your own time making the same garbage, then you too can have a career as an “influencer”! I don’t think any of this is giving the benefits your YouTube viewing has.

"The Stare" is IMHO not the stare at a phone, but the response to a question.

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.

Parents, no. Mostly Gen X.

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.

Gen X

No, mostly Gen X. Gen Alpha's parents are more likely to be Millenials.

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.

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.

The worst parents how?

But in this case it's actually backed by evidence. PISA scores have been edging down since the mid 2010s and took a further dip in the 2020s.

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.

> older people being unable to operate all the stuff the kids do as easily as breathing

Can you give an example of that?

"Kids These Days" don't even know how to operate a perfectly standard smartphone without help.

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.

In at least one case...

Their. possessive. Gen Z and their parents is correct. Referring to the parents of Gen Z.

For reference,

they're. contraction. Gen Z and they are parents. Is not what was intended.

there. location. Over there.