Gen Z Is the First Generation Dumber Than Their Parents

andsoitis

Since Gen Alpha is around, is there a turnaround or is the negative trend persisting?

andsoitis

Their parents are mostly Millennials, yes?

andai

Didn't Flynn effect reverse in the early 90s?

sleepyguy

Perhaps schools should return to pencils and paper, teach the basics and create strong foundations, focus on academia instead of football.

bluebarbet

>Generation [...] Their Hope for grammar is fast fading, anyway.

pmpmpmpm

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.

vxxzy

I suspect the distribution is more lumpy, best case. Worst case, the progeny of the affluent are eating up those sweet gains.

ocd

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.

fantasizr

it's not their fault. they were given addictive smartphones or have parents addicted to them, bad teachers, etc.

lanstin

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.

Neywiny

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.

variety8675

Every generation says this. Example (Sep 4, 1977) https://time.com/archive/6849143/education-why-those-falling...

elendilm

It takes effort and work to un-dumb ourselves atleast in that domain. I would argue that its a function of raw effort in varying domains.

ozgung

> 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.

jt2190

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. [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...

hemc4

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.

swed420

None of the comments so far are engaging with the OP, whose written testimony was included in the article: 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...

28304283409234

Blame the parents.

layman51

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?

xgkickt

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.