From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.advocacy

On 11 Jun 2026, Lissajous <[email protected]> posted some news:[email protected]:

"According to standardized testing and confirmed by academic research,
Gen Z is falling behind in math, reading, and logic.

"However, we are told there is nothing to fear because they are
excelling in inclusion and environmental awareness. "

"America�s Worst Generation Is Dumber Than Us, Research Confirms"

<https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/06/americas-worst-generation-is-
dumber-than-us-research/>

"Generation Z has shown a quantifiable, documented decline in
foundational cognitive and physical skills, including mathematical
logic, verbal reasoning, visual problem-solving, and baseline physical fitness, driven largely by the displacement of deep-focus activities
by thousands of hours of digital consumption.

Liberal think tanks, however, claim that the results are mixed rather
than abysmal. To offset these measurable losses, they point to areas
where Gen Z has allegedly gained ground, such as environmental
awareness, social inclusion, and digital fluency.

Pride parades, protests for open borders, and a war on oil are now considered replacements for reading, writing, and reasoning. In fact,
if the powers-that-be decide that inclusion and climate outweigh math
and science, then Gen Z is way ahead.

Don�t you feel foolish now for believing Gen Z was becoming dumber?
They are actually evolving into socially aware, inclusive beings.

For most of the 20th century, each generation of Americans scored
higher on intelligence tests than the one before. The phenomenon,
documented by New Zealand researcher James Flynn and known as the
Flynn Effect, showed average IQ rising by roughly three points per
decade across developed nations. Researchers attributed the gains to improvements in education, nutrition, and public health.

That upward trend has now reversed, and the reversal is concentrated
in Generation Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, who have become the
first cohort in the modern era to score measurably lower than their
parents across a range of cognitive, physical, and behavioral metrics.

The foundational evidence for the IQ reversal comes from a 2018 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Norwegian economists Bernt Bratsberg and Ole Rogeberg of the Ragnar
Frisch Centre for Economic Research at the University of Oslo.
Analyzing cognitive ability scores from military conscription data
covering more than 730,000 Norwegian men born between 1962 and 1991,
they found that IQ scores peaked for the 1975 birth cohort and
declined approximately 0.2 points per year afterward.

Their most consequential finding was that the decline appeared within families, brothers born later scored lower than brothers born earlier,
ruling out genetic selection or immigration as explanations. Their conclusion: �Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally
caused.� A parallel 2023 study, confirmed a reverse Flynn Effect in
the United States, with declining scores in matrix reasoning, letter
and number series, and verbal reasoning, and the steepest declines
among adults aged 18 to 22.

Compulsory military IQ data extend the pattern across eight countries.
Tests from Finland, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Australia all show declines beginning in the
mid-1990s, before the smartphone era and the rise of social media,
suggesting that screens may have accelerated an existing trend rather
than caused it. The aggregate decline across these analyses is
estimated at approximately 2 to 5 IQ points compared to peak cohorts.

The standardized testing record reinforces the IQ data. The
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development�s Programme for International Student Assessment, known as PISA 2022, recorded the
largest single-cycle decline in mathematics performance in the
assessment�s 23-year history, an average drop of roughly 15 points
across OECD countries, equivalent to three-quarters of a year of
schooling lost. Reading scores fell 10 points; science scores dropped comparably. OECD noted that downward trends in reading and science
were observable before the COVID-19 pandemic, placing the cause well
ahead of the disruptions of 2020.

In the United States, the National Assessment of Educational Progress,
the Nation�s Report Card, released 2024 results for 12th graders in September 2025, covering students tested between January and March
2024. Math and reading scores each fell three percentage points from
2019. Only 22% of high school seniors reached proficiency in math,
down from 24%, and only 35% reached proficiency in reading, down from
37%.

A record-high percentage of the Class of 2024 scored at the �below
basic� level in both subjects compared to all previous assessments.
Acting Commissioner Matthew Soldner stated: �Scores for our
lowest-performing students are at historic lows, continued declines
that began more than a decade ago. My predecessor warned of this
trend, and her predecessor warned of this trend as well.� Compared to
the first 12th-grade NAEP reading assessment in 1992, the 2024 average
score is 10 points lower.

The deterioration in reading extends into higher education. At
Pepperdine University, professor Jessica Hooten Wilson described
students arriving unable to engage with assigned texts. �It�s not even
an inability to critically think,� she told Fortune. �It�s an
inability to read sentences.� Nearly half of all Americans did not
read a single book in 2025, a habit that has fallen roughly 40% over
the last decade. Americans aged 18 to 29 read an average of just 5.8
books in 2025 � the lowest of any generation surveyed.

Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath offered the dominant explanatory framework in written testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on
Commerce, Science, and Transportation in January 2026. Despite Gen Z spending more time in formal schooling than any previous generation,
he testified, their cognitive capability had declined. He attributed
the trend to educational environments built around screens, condensed content, and short-form video, formats that train the brain for speed
and novelty-seeking rather than the sustained, effortful reasoning
that academic assessments and real-world problem-solving demand.

Cognitive ability scores began declining around 2010, corresponding
with the mass adoption of smartphones and educational technology in classrooms. American schools spent roughly $30 billion on education technology in 2024, ten times what they spent on textbooks that same
year. Student performance did not improve. A February 2025 Microsoft
study found that AI use was associated with poorer judgment and
critical- thinking skills, a phenomenon Mary Burns, co-author of a
Brookings Institution study on the subject, described as �cognitive offloading.�

Three factors correlate with the timeline of declining scores: the establishment and expansion of the Department of Education, the
replacement of textbooks with EdTech in classrooms, and the
displacement of academic instruction time by Social-Emotional Learning curricula. No peer-reviewed study establishes causation in either
direction, but what the data does establish is that every major
institutional intervention coincides with flat or declining
performance at dramatically increased cost.

The United States Department of Education was established in 1980 with
a budget of $14 billion. Its 2024 budget stood at $238 billion, a
1,600% increase. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted per-pupil
spending rose 154%, while reading scores improved by just 3% and math
scores by 7%. Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, reviewing decades of evidence, concluded that there is little consistent relationship
between resources devoted to schools and student achievement.

American schools compounded the spending problem by directing it
toward technology. By 2024, they were spending ten times as much on
EdTech as they spent on textbooks, while cognitive scores declined.
Horvath testified before the U.S. Senate that screen-based learning
trains students for speed and novelty rather than the sustained
reasoning required for academic performance.

Alongside increased technology spending, 83% of U.S. schools were
using Social-Emotional Learning curricula by the 2023�24 school year,
up from 46% in 2017�18. These programs consumed between 10 and 90
minutes of instructional time per session, expanding during the same
period that saw the steepest standardized test-score declines since
NAEP began"

Woke and unions have ruined US public education.
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