Gen Z Is ‘Dumber’ Thanks To Adults Forcing Screens On Them

For all the noise surrounding Gen Z’s cognitive decline, the more honest question is not whether young Americans are capable of deep thought but why they would be motivated to pursue it in the first place.

A recent New York Post article declaring Gen Z “dumber” than previous generations is itself a perfect illustration of the problem: a surface-level take built around a provocative headline, thin contextualization, and little engagement with the actual data it cites. In other words, the reporter skimmed to produce this report, exhibiting exactly the behavior the media outlet condemns.

The New York Post relies on testimony from neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, who did, in fact, present troubling evidence to Congress. Despite this, the article compresses that testimony into a caricature, reducing a complex structural argument into an insult lobbed at an entire generation of young people. Horvath’s written statement is a warning that evolving technology and cultural attitudes contribute to the state of today’s youth’s educational development. 

“Over the past two decades,” Horvath writes, “the cognitive development of children across much of the developed world has stalled and, in many domains, reversed.” That reversal is historically unprecedented. For over a century, expanding access to education reliably produced cognitive gains until the mid-2000s. 

Blaming Gen Z is of little interest to Horvath; instead, he points to the education system. The most significant change, he argues, is the “rapid and largely unregulated expansion of educational technology” that now dominates classrooms. International assessments such as the Programme for International Studies Assessment (PISA), the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS), and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), which tracked millions of students over several decades, show a consistent pattern: “When students self-report classroom computer use, higher daily screen exposure consistently corresponds to lower scores in reading, mathematics, and science.” 

The promise that technology would deepen learning has largely gone unfulfilled. 

Gen Z came of age in an educational system obsessed with quantification. Grades, rubrics, standardized tests, behavior charts, and participation metrics defined success. Even creativity was bureaucratized. A poem for class might have been assigned as an act of self-expression, but both teacher and student knew it was just another item on a year-long checklist. Knowledge became transactional rather than something sought after out of curiosity.

This environment trained students to skim through rather than explore the subject material. Horvath explains why this matters at the neurological level. “Human attention systems evolved to sustain focus on a single task at a time,” he notes. Digital platforms, by contrast, are “engineered to capture attention, fragment focus, and accelerate task switching.” Learning thus shifted from deep encoding to surface familiarity. Students recognized information without retaining it.

Beyond cognition lies motivation. Why would a young person want to read deeply, think slowly, or wrestle seriously with history or philosophy in a culture that treats immediacy as truth? We live in a society that privileges the most recent headline, the latest clip, and the viral take. Information arrives constantly like an endless rain, flooding our minds with droplets stripped of context and hierarchy. What matters most is not whether something is true but whether it is new. 

Neil Postman warned about this decades ago. In his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, he observed that information does not equal knowledge and that a culture flooded with disconnected facts risks losing the capacity for meaning altogether. It is the same plight as fast-fashion consumerism, where buyers cycle through the latest, cheaply made, trendy clothing items only to discard them shortly after they become outdated in the eyes of the zeitgeist. Information is similarly consumed and then discarded as a garbage commodity. 

Schools increasingly mirror the logic of modern media. History is often taught as a set of emotional impressions rather than a coherent narrative grounded in chronology and causation. Teachers shrug off names and dates in favor of a quick pace and political correctness. Students are unaware of how the past shapes the present and inevitably makes our future. Gen Z was encouraged to react before they understood the big picture. Moral interpretation replaces careful study, and the irony is that today’s educators wouldn’t dare evoke the very Bible that built much of traditional America’s moral compass. 

Horvath highlights that handwritten notes outperform typing because handwriting “forces summarization, organization, and conceptual encoding.” These practices slow students down. They demand patience. But patience has become a liability in a culture built around speed. 

The Covid panic exposed these dynamics in their most extreme form. When education collapsed into Zoom video conferences and digital surveillance, learning became almost entirely performative. Students were observed and recorded but rarely invited to wonder. Many emerged knowing how to comply, yet they remain unsure how to think independently. 

If Gen Z appears disengaged or shallow, that may say less about intellectual capacity than about incentives. In a culture that rewards speed, novelty, and surface-level reaction, deep learning becomes something humans try to outsource to machines. The encouraging truth is that the desire to know has not disappeared. It has simply been buried alive. 

Until schools reckon honestly with how technology and digital media fracture attention and reward speed over substance, appeals for deeper thinking will remain performative; no child can be expected to dig deeper in an educational system engineered to keep him skimming. By teaching children to assimilate to the digital downward spiral rather than resist it, schools are not educating at all — they are formalizing America’s decline. 

Julianna Frieman is a writer who covers culture, technology, and civilization. She has an M.A. in Communications (Digital Strategy) from the University of Florida and a B.A. in Political Science from UNC Charlotte. Her work has been published by the Daily Caller, The American Spectator, and The Federalist. Follow her on X at @juliannafrieman. Find her on Substack at juliannafrieman.substack.com.