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. Representative Image created by AI.

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.

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