07/10/2026
America didn’t just put screens in classrooms.
We built the classroom around them.
By 2024, schools had spent more than $30 billion putting laptops, tablets, learning apps, testing platforms, and digital tools in front of students.
That is a massive bet.
And now one neuroscientist is saying the bet didn’t just fail.
It may have made the problem worse.
In January 2026, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and made a point that should stop every parent, teacher, and policymaker for a second.
Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower than the generation before them on major cognitive measures.
Literacy.
Numeracy.
Attention.
Memory.
Executive function.
General IQ.
That’s not one bad test score.
That’s not “kids these days.”
That’s a warning light on the dashboard.
For most of modern history, the pattern moved in the other direction. Each generation tended to outperform the one before it. Better nutrition helped. Better schools helped. Better access to information helped.
That long upward trend is often called the Flynn Effect.
But according to Horvath, Gen Z broke the pattern.
And his argument isn’t that this generation is lazy, hopeless, or somehow born different.
That’s the lazy take.
His argument is that adults changed the learning environment around them.
We replaced long reading with quick summaries.
We replaced productive struggle with instant answers.
We replaced quiet focus with constant notifications.
We replaced paper, pencils, books, and human interaction with devices that were often designed to keep attention moving, not keep thinking deep.
That matters because learning is not supposed to feel frictionless.
Real learning usually has some resistance to it.
You sit with a hard paragraph.
You reread the sentence.
You wrestle with the math problem.
You remember something because your brain had to work for it.
A screen can be useful.
But when the screen becomes the default, the brain often gets trained for skimming instead of studying.
Fast instead of deep.
Convenient instead of durable.
Stimulated instead of focused.
And this is where the image says a lot.
One generation learned in a world where boredom was still allowed to do its job.
The next generation is trying to learn while carrying the most addictive device ever created in human history in their pocket.
That’s not an even fight.
Other countries are already pulling back.
Sweden has moved back toward printed textbooks after years of digital-first schooling. South Korea passed a nationwide classroom phone ban. Several European countries have restricted phones in schools.
America, meanwhile, spent billions going deeper into the experiment.
And to be clear, this does not mean technology has no place in education.
Technology can help.
But “can help” and “should dominate the school day” are not the same sentence.
A calculator can help with math.
It should not replace learning how numbers work.
A video can explain a concept.
It should not replace the habit of reading carefully.
A learning app can support practice.
It should not replace attention, memory, discipline, and human teaching.
The uncomfortable part is that Gen Z didn’t build this system.
Adults did.
School boards bought it.
Tech companies sold it.
Administrators normalized it.
Parents handed over the devices.
And students grew up inside the world we created.
So maybe the question isn’t, “What’s wrong with kids today?”
Maybe the better question is:
What did we remove from their lives and then pretend they no longer needed?
Because the old paperback on the couch and the glowing phone beside the ignored textbook tell the story pretty clearly.
The issue isn’t that kids have access to information.
The issue is that access to information is not the same thing as wisdom, focus, memory, or understanding.
The $30 billion screen experiment was sold as the future of education.
But the future may need a lot more books, a lot more face-to-face teaching, and a lot fewer glowing rectangles.
