Gen Z is the first generation with lower IQs than their parents – here’s why

“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. “The rule is: learn the skill first, then use the tool to make it easier. If you use the tool to begin with, you’ll never develop the skill,” he says. “If you know how to format an essay and spell certain words, now we’ll bring in word processing. But if you start on a word processor, you will forever be dependent on the tool. If we give you a calculator before you understand arithmetic, you will forever be tied to the calculator.” Shorts Technology also gives us an illusion of confidence. “GPS is easier than reading a map, but it leads you to believe that you understand navigation better – unless you grew up with maps and realise, ‘I suck at navigation now.’” He believes that we have, en masse, made a mistake in believing that higher order skills of creativity, critical thinking and communication are separate from knowledge. “People thought that we now have knowledge from the internet or AI, so all we need to do is build those skills and kids’ [intelligence] is going to explode,” he says. “But creativity and critical thinking emerge from knowledge. The more we learn, the more creative we are. And the less we teach our kids, the less creative and critical they will be.” “In 2018, Singapore had the best academic performance worldwide on science, maths and reading and the best performance on all measures of creativity. Number two, in both, was Japan. It’s basically a perfect correlation [between academics and creativity].” Japan has been slow to adopt technology in classrooms, with tablets rolled out in 2019, almost a decade after Sweden, which, after adopting ed-tech early, has now increased paper-based learning and reduced screen time. In contrast, Singapore has been an earlier adopter of technology: it is currently supporting teachers to use AI, but the Government’s technology policy is clear that “teachers are navigators” and cautions that “over-reliance on AI could potentially hinder the development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills.” Directors of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study international assessments believe that it is the quality of teaching and status of education, which is considered a priority, that means Singapore tops leaderboards internationally. Horvath finds that Singapore, Japan, Korea and China come top in all the international tests he compares, including International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS), International Study on Online Learning (ISOL) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). People often ask him why these big tech countries haven’t experienced the same downturn in results. He maintains that these are “the four least tech-educational countries in the world.” He explains: “They realise you’ve got to learn in order to make the computer useful. It wasn’t until Covid that they started to bring tech in because they had to. Post-Covid, they held on to the tech, and now their scores are dropping,” he says. When it comes to AI in universities, he cannot understand how it has any place. “If the goal of your institution is learning at any level, then you can’t circumvent the learning. If the goal of your institution is performance, then by all means use AI, but I don’t know that any university prides itself on output.” ‘Young children do seem to learn better from other humans, but the answers are less clear-cut for older pupils,’ says Professor Dylan Wiliam (Photographer: Gary John Norman) And using AI in schools, he believes, is “the quickest route to make sure [pupils] never figure out how to do anything”. He says it’s the difference between offloading, to make lives easier once we have expertise to vet the answers, and outsourcing, when you can’t vet anything. “The tools we use as experts to make lives easier are never the tools a novice should use if they hope to learn how to become an expert.” Dylan Wiliam, emeritus professor of educational assessment at the UCL Institute of Education, thinks it’s not so clear-cut. “Much tech currently used in schools is poor quality, but well-designed software can enhance student learning. The crucial issue is not the amount of tech, but whether it is helping pupils do more or less cognitively demanding work,” he says. “Young children do seem to learn better from other humans, but the answers are less clear-cut for older pupils. I agree that humans do seem to be hard-wired to learn from other humans, but it doesn’t mean that the right kinds of technology couldn’t do better. Evolution has given humans the ability to move at up to 20 miles per hour, but the bicycle allows them to use their existing muscles to move at least twice that speed,” he adds. “AI can certainly short circuit learning, but it can also make new kinds of approaches to learning possible. Google’s NotebookLM allows students to interact with textbooks in a way that has never been possible before, so what is important is to ensure our students are using technology to amplify their thinking, rather than doing thinking for them.” As for whether Gen Z is less cognitively developed than their parents, Wiliam says it’s “enormously complex”. “Cognitive development is multidimensional. Some things seem to be getting worse, but others are getting better, so it depends on how much weight you give to the different components,” he says. Horvath himself doesn’t believe technology should be wholesale banned in schools: when it comes to learning computer skills, he believes it’s a natural fit. But he doesn’t think it should become the default learning tool. “The argument we need to teach computer skills has morphed into the argument that we need to teach all skills through a computer,” he says. “We need to backtrack to what we were doing in about 2008, and then use that as our new stepping stone to push forward without tech. Here’s where we say: ‘We didn’t know any better. We now know better, and so now we’re going to do better.’ It’s about taking control of tech again and being very intentional with how we use it,” he believes. I’m not sure we’re about to have a mea culpa moment in the UK, but the role of ed tech is being questioned. A spokesperson for the Department for Education says: “We are clear that technology should enhance, not replace, the deep thinking, creativity and critical engagement that underpin effective learning. We are co-designing the next generation of safe AI tutoring tools with teachers to help level the playing field for disadvantaged pupils and investing £23m to understand which technologies have the greatest impact in schools and how they can be used most effectively.” As for Gen Z, Horvath hopes they feel angry. “As much as I talk about their cognitive maldevelopment, this was done to them. It’s not their fault. They never asked us to shove a screen in front of their face at school. So I hope as they get older, they get mad.” The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning and How to Help Them Thrive Again, by Dr Jared Cooney Horvath, is published by Penguin Random House (£22)