“We gave the kids laptops and took their brains” – That's because we don't adapt the technology to fit the students, we reshape the kids to fit the tools

Why, after generations of progress, are today's children less intellectually capable than their parents? This is almost a no-go question. And to top it all off, we're lowering the test bar to hide our children's declining comprehension, test scores compared over decades show, says neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath.

For nearly two centuries, the West has experienced steady generational progress. Throughout the 20th century, IQ scores rose steadily, with each generation gaining about six points more than their parents.

This growth was largely driven by improvements in education: the more time children spent in school, the higher their cognitive abilities.

But, since 2000, something has changed.

“Digital Illusion”

“For the first time in the history of standardized cognitive measurement, Generation Z consistently scores lower than their parents on many key measures of cognitive development – ​​from literacy and numeracy to deep creativity and general IQ. And preliminary data from Generation Alpha (born after 2012) suggests the decline is not slowing down – it's accelerating,” says Australian neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath.

Jared Cooney Horvath's book “The Digital Illusion: How Technology in the Classroom is Affecting Our Children's Learning and How to Help Them” was reviewed by The Free Press.

“The Erosion of Rigorous Thinking”

The researcher doesn't advocate removing technology from schools, but cites decades of studies showing that increasing “consumption of information via screens leads to lower performance, fragmented attention, and the slow erosion of rigorous thinking.”

What's going wrong?

“Researchers such as Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt point to smartphones and social media as tools that promote sedentary behavior and encourage isolation. Others, such as Abigail Shrier and Greg Lukianoff, argue that we have over-medicalized childhood, treating ordinary experiences as 'trauma' and shielding children from discomfort in ways that make them fragile and unprepared,” says the Australian researcher.

While these factors shed light on the current mental health crisis, they do not fully explain cognitive collapse. Why are so many children learning less?

To answer that question, we need to look at the one place most parents still trust to support learning: the school. Today, children spend more and more hours in classrooms, but they develop more slowly, the author of the book believes.

And this correlates with the use of digital tools, including those in the classroom.

What do the PISA tests say?

In 2012, 2015 and 2018, the PISA tests asked students correlatively how much time they spend using digital devices in a typical school day. When these responses were compared with the test results, the results showed a clear and worrying picture.

The more time students spent in front of screens at school, the more their scores dropped. On average, those who used the computer more than six hours a day scored 65 points lower than their peers who did not use it at all. This is equivalent to a drop of two points in the grading system to 10. That is, a drop, for example, from a grade of 9 to 7.

“The Superficials,” Nicholas Carr's phrase

Jared Cooney Horvath's recently published book “The Digital Illusion” is far from the only one drawing attention to the phenomenon.

“Superficials: the effects of the Internet on the human brain” is his volume, also published in Romania Nicholas Carr, American writer concerned with the topic of the effect of digitization on the human brain.

The “superficial” do not belong to a generation, because the lack of concentration other than in front of the digital screen becomes contagious.

What Jared Cooney Horvath's book brings up, controversially and strikingly, is that the effects are not only chemical but also organic.

The tools we give children

“We don't adapt the tools to fit our children, we reshape the children to fit the tools. We lower the bar to hide our children's diminishing capacity for understanding,” says the author.

When we read from paper, each word occupies a fixed physical location, he explains. “If you are reading a print version of this article right now, this sentence exists right here—and this spatial position becomes part of the memory you form. That's why readers often remember where an idea appeared in a book, even if they can't remember the exact words'.

“Digital text has no such stability. If you scroll through this article on your computer or phone, then this sentence first appeared at the bottom of the screen, is now near the middle, and will soon disappear from the top. Without a fixed location to attach ideas to, the spatial scaffolding that supports memory collapses,” explains Jared Cooney Horvath.

“It's not about removing computers from schools, it's about restoring rigor to the classroom. It's not a fight for tools, it's a fight for values. It's a fight for the kind of people we want our children to become,” says the neuroscientist.