News

This is actually kind of surprising since some of the more pervasive poisons (like lead) were reduced. I wonder if some others were introduced that we'll learn about later...

I know people like to jump right to screens and devices and "social media", but it is fairly instructive that some fairly prominent people in tech had set some boundaries on their kids' use of such things...

https://www.thelist.com/677684/the-real-reason-tech-moguls-dont-let-their-kids-on-social-media/

Also - when I read that studies show that people tend to absorb the content of actual, physical books better than reading an ebook, I tend to seek out the hardcopy of a book for important topics I need to really understand.

That would mean that we peaked at the millennials?

Don't blame the kids, they grew up with a vastly different environment and influences. Poor bastards have had enough problems without this shit.

So, I tried looking for any sort for any write-up, journal, or article in which Horvath details his findings or data analysis. I haven't found anything except articles referencing what he said in front of the Senate. Without that, it's impossible to tell how he determined causality.

Without completely rejecting his correlation to screen time, here are some changes I noticed between my time as a middle schooler and the past decade that I've now worked in public education:

• More advanced topics: 6th graders are now learning about photovoltaics. Not just listing it as a renewable energy, but the actual functions of photons interacting with elections. This extends to many topics that were omitted or unheard of for millennials.
• Advanced academics: classes that I'd taken as electives or as part of an advanced placement program in high school have been moved down to, or are offered in, middle school.
• Frequency of testing: when I started in public education nearly 10 years ago, students were given more standardized tests per year than there were days in a school year. And this didn't account for the district, department, or teacher-assigned tests and quizzes. The number of standardized tests have gone down a bit somewhat recently, but those dark times still affect the average standardized testing scores for the entire generation.
• Less informed teachers: remember that part about more advanced topics entering the lessons and more advanced classes being offered earlier? Well, while the lessons changed, many of the teachers didn't. That meant that teachers with outdated knowledge and concepts were attempting to teach concepts beyond their own understanding. For a while there, while older teachers tended to have better classroom control, their students' test scores were often crap compared to the younger teachers. And due to seniority and campus behavioral expectations, departmental meetings were often led by the older teachers, who emphasized control. The belief for a while was that if you could engage the students, their test scores would go up; not if you were engaging them with the wrong information, though!
• Increased stressors: younger and younger students were expected to interact with increasingly advanced technology. What went from my friends and me sharing games we programmed on our TI-83s turned into young students sending nudes from their borrowed laptops. Students were given power they weren't yet able to comprehend, because horniness is a powerful driver to kids who are being denied sex education. This led to them stressing out over the uncontrollable nature of data transfer.
• Inability to escape the past: teachers used to have to go into an office, and search through files in folders within cabinets to learn about a student's past behavior. A search like this was usually preempted by a student showing concerning behavior. Now, every incident is stored in a quickly accessible database. One that many teachers will look through to form opinions about their students before ever meeting them. This disadvantages students genuinely trying to reform their image, or escape biases based on long-since-passed choices.

Without an understanding of what Horvath was studying, I can only focus on the contributing factors that I saw. And based on those, we fucking failed those kids. All things considered, I'd say that Gen Z is performing pretty well considering how fucked they were from the start.

I would expect that leaded gasoline was responsible for the first gen stupider than their parents, but I have no data.

That's not an accident.

That's government policy.

Gen Z has a lot of shit stacked against them. I'm glad the article doesn't go "blaming" Gen Z for "being dumber", but instead is focusing on the fact it's a parenting failure. COVID era learning difficulties, constantly being bombarded with tech designed to suck out their soul, AI being everywhere for their college age life, etc.

As a Millennial, I've seen the blame game. I only hope we come out of this spiral as a society.

This is directly tied to the No Child Left Behind Act passing 25 years ago. It's been a coordinated effort to dumb down the populace and make them less informed

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.

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?

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.

As a millenial who went through the shite by the media about how much of a snowflake we are by getting offended with everything, frivolous for ordering avocado toasts for breakfasts, and clueless and unequipped when it comes to working, I ask: "who raised us?" I remember the parents' moral panic on videogames and cartoons in the 1990s and 2000s. Many kids of my generation weren't let out because the boomer and Gen X parents were made afraid by the constant news cycle of serial killers and high crime rate. And they wonder why we're so sheltered? Now, the media run by older generations are taking potshots at Gen Z claiming they are dumber. Even if that is the case, who are the ones who raised Gen Z to be constantly glued to the phone screen and watching brain rotting contents that led to lower IQ?

The next time the media complains such and such generation is behaving a certain way or being dumb, even if scientific study says so, ask yourself, who are raising these kids?

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

I might be wrong but I think this might be more of a failing of the US education system than an across the board decline world wide. Although I do think millenials but much more so Gen Z and Alpha are adversly affected by social media than the generations before by tv.

Republican policies are working! This is a US centric phenomena, right? Not something happening in china?

I would also say this is what happens when public transit is largely unfunded

Idiocracy is well on its way.

Awww, but I loved seeing headlines how I, personally, as a millennial, am killing industries. I miss those days. ;_;

If its screens it should be effecting all the generations but at a certain point you stop taking standardized tests. Would be interesting for a societ if they kept on having them and you could see how cognitive decline worked.

Ah I see it's time for our weekly "You're miserable because of group-X" rage bait stupid fucking headlines.

I am far more concerned about our adults' screen time, the people who are supposed to be running our goddamn fucking country are spending all their time scrolling and tweeting for attention and posting rage-bait and getting in trouble for irresponsible internet usage.

At least the kids growing up on the internet right now will have some kind of perspective and understanding how the shit works.

I mean, we still need to do something about algorithmic amplification of our worst feelings and impulses driving waves of insecure people into the arms of grifters and crumbling society broadly, but I want to BAN ADULTS FROM THE INTERNET FIRST.

sigh. every generation has this article. and even if it was true the failure would still be at the previous generations, because kids can't be blamed for the school system we decide for them or a society thats so anti family that parents barely have time to give attention to their kids. 

don't worry gen z: they told the same stuff about us etc. blame generations so we don't see that the real unfairness always was and still is the distribution of wealth. 

and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

This is click bait