Watch the video above for my long-form criticism of public education!
Every generation of kids has outperformed their parents. More schooling, more resources, more cognitive horsepower passed down the line. That’s just how it’s worked for a hundred years.
Gen Z just broke the pattern.
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As one researcher recently laid it out, Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to underperform previous generations on basically every cognitive measure available. Attention. Memory. Literacy. Numeracy. Executive functioning. General IQ. Every single one, moving in the wrong direction, even though today’s kids spend more total hours in school than any generation before them.
So what changed?
It Can’t Be School Itself
The obvious suspects don’t hold up. It can’t be the schools themselves, because schools basically look the same as they did twenty years ago. It can’t be biology, because evolution doesn’t work on a fifteen year timeline. The one thing that actually changed inside the classroom during that window is the tool being used to deliver the lesson.
Digital technology.
Across eighty different countries, once schools widely adopted digital technology, academic performance dropped, and it dropped significantly. Kids using computers for roughly five hours a day for schoolwork score over two-thirds of a standard deviation lower than kids who rarely or never touch a screen at school. That’s not a fluke limited to one country’s education system. That’s a pattern showing up on every continent tracked.
Bring it back home and the story holds. Take any state’s NAEP scores, the national assessment used to track student achievement across the country, and compare them to the exact year that state rolled out one-to-one technology programs, a laptop or tablet for every student. The scores plateau. Then they start dropping.
This isn’t a new theory either. Academic research stretching back to 1962 shows the same result, over and over, for sixty straight years. When technology enters the classroom, learning goes down. The reason is almost embarrassingly simple. Kids skim on screens. They don’t read deeply, they don’t sit with hard material, they scan for the next dopamine hit the same way they scroll social media.
Rather than asking what we actually want children to learn and building an education system around that goal, schools quietly redefined education itself to fit the tool sitting on every desk. That’s not innovation. That’s surrender, dressed up in a laptop cart.
And Then the Boys Just Leave
Here’s where the story gets darker. That cognitive decline is hitting an entire generation right as they’re supposed to be transitioning into adulthood, into careers, into college. And a huge share of young men are looking at what higher education has become and simply walking away.
The numbers are staggering. Men now make up only 42 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients nationally, the lowest share ever recorded. About one million fewer young men are enrolled in college today compared to 2011. At schools like the University of Vermont, male undergraduate enrollment has dropped from 45 percent in 2015 down to just 37 percent today.
This isn’t happening because young men suddenly stopped valuing success. It’s happening because they’ve done the math, and increasingly, they don’t like the answer college gives them.
Nearly forty percent of young men say colleges are designed to benefit women more than men. Skepticism toward the value of a degree runs deep across the political spectrum, but it’s most pronounced among conservatives, where seventy four percent now doubt college is worth it at all. Compare that to a trade job paying twenty five to thirty dollars an hour straight out of high school, no debt attached, and the choice stops looking irrational. It starts looking obvious.
Two Systems, One Failure
Put these two stories side by side and a pattern emerges that should terrify anyone paying attention. An education system that hands a laptop to every eight-year-old and calls it progress, even as the research says it’s quietly eroding attention spans and literacy. Then, a decade later, that same system hands those same kids a soul-crushing amount of debt for a degree an increasing share of young men have decided isn’t even worth pursuing.
The kids getting dumber in elementary school are the same kids opting out of higher education by eighteen. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a pipeline, built one bad policy decision at a time, from the first tablet handed to a kindergartner to the empty seat where a young man used to sit in a college classroom.
Nobody in charge of either system seems interested in asking why. They just keep buying more laptops, and keep wondering why enrollment keeps shrinking.
