Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath delivers a warning on Fox News that should stop every policymaker, school leader and parent in their tracks.
Gen Z is the first generation in recorded history to score lower than their parents on measures of memory, attention, creativity, critical thinking and general IQ. Across the board. Not in one subject. Not in one country.
When researchers look for a common thread, one factor keeps emerging: the large-scale introduction of digital tools into classrooms.
Humans have evolved for roughly 150,000 years to learn in very specific ways. Deep reading. Handwriting. Summarising ideas. Organising thoughts. These processes are slow, effortful, and biologically aligned with how learning actually happens.
Screens disrupt this.
Typing notes encourages verbatim copying, hearing a word, and typing a word, which feels productive but leads to shallow retention. Handwriting forces students to process, prioritise and make sense of information before it reaches the page. That effort is what embeds learning.
As Horvath explains, if you could change one thing to improve learning outcomes, it wouldn’t be a new app or platform.
It would be this: read on paper, not on screens.
The consequences are now showing up in the assessment, too. In the US, when the SAT moved fully online, long-form reading passages were quietly replaced with short sentences. Reading comprehension wasn’t improved; it was redefined to fit the medium.
And this matters here in the UK.
Ofqual is now consulting on moving GCSEs and A-Levels onto screens by 2030. Evidence consistently shows that when exams go digital, performance drops, often masked by statistical “re-norming” that hides the accurate scale of decline.
This isn’t EdTech evolving into something better.
Its standards are being lowered to fit technology.
Horvath explores this evidence in depth in his book The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning and How to Help Them Thrive Again, an essential read.
EdTech was never the silver bullet it was sold as and the data suggests it is not getting better. It’s getting worse.
