News

Ironic. The article does not frame the outcome as the fault of Gen Z. It in fact goes to great lengths to point out that the fault almost certainly lies with how they were educated, and the parenting environment they were raised in.

I'll highlight the framed factors for you and where the blame gets pointed.

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.

Schools leaned hard into technology during the same window. Educational software replaced textbooks, long readings, and extended problem-solving. After class, students returned to phones, tablets, and laptops, bouncing between social feeds and bite-sized explanations of material they never sat with for very long.

“I’m not anti-tech. I’m pro-rigor,” Horvath told the Post. Rigor, in his view, comes from friction. Reading full texts. Working through confusion. Spending time with material that doesn’t immediately reward you. Take that friction away, and cognitive skills dull. Brains adapt to the environment they’re given, and this one prizes speed over staying power.

The same decline appears outside the United States. Horvath told senators that across roughly 80 countries, academic performance drops after digital technology becomes widely embedded in classrooms. The timing alone raises serious questions about how learning environments affect cognitive development.

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. 

Most frustrating for me is not just that many people read this article and take away an emotive framing that is completely counter to the text of the article, but that many people on Lemmy that read this article will just memory-hole it and continue to complain about phone bans in school, and the under-16 social media bans going on around the world that are very likely to have significant positive benefits for children's learning and go some ways to resolving the problem.

Or that elitist billionaires have been targeting them with propaganda campaigns for over a decade discouraging them from pursuing higher education and becoming part of the educated "elite."

I am Gen X and our parents plunked us in front of the TV however there were only 3 channels that often had nothing of interest to kids on. But they also kicked us out of the house all day so we had to find other kids to play with and negotiate with, so got more exercise, had adventures without adults managing every minute of our time. We walked to school by ourselves, no buses picking us up at the door. But the parents didn't really spend more time with us because they were working.. sometimes more than one job and daycare did not exist. Now if you did that as a parent, you would get CPS called on you. Also GenX parents went hard the other way being helicopter parents. I was more of a free range parent so had to find other ones to find kids for my son to do things with like ride bikes to the park or drop off to the movies. There has to be a happy medium.