“Gen Z is the first generation in history to be less cognitively developed than their parents’ generation,” Jared Cooney Horvath, author of newly published book The Digital Delusion, tells me. “I would never say ‘stupider’,” the teacher and neuroscientist adds with a smile. “I just say less ‘cognitively developed’ because maybe there’s something else going on that we don’t know.”
He says that until 2010, every generation was cognitively superior to their parents. The reason for this was that school and education for students were consistently improving. “The golden age of education was from about 1996 to 2010,” he explains. But since then, IQ scores worldwide have been going down. He believes this is linked directly to screens becoming widespread in schools. “Human beings are not biologically wired to learn very well from tech: we’re built to learn from other humans,” he says.
Ed-tech is big business, generating an annual turnover of around £6.5bn in the UK, according to the Department for Education and closer to $400bn in the US, where 88 per cent of all students have their own school laptop. It might sound excellent for equipping children for the digital age, but Horvath believes it is a case of humans mistaking tools for skills.
