It's not about the kids tho...

The same decline appears outside the United States. Horvath told senators that across roughly 80 countries, academic performance drops after digital technology becomes widely embedded in classrooms. The timing alone raises serious questions about how learning environments affect cognitive development.

It's about how instead of making them think, we taught them to just fucking Google shit and believe what it says.

"Oregon Trail generation" who grew up using computers but still having to learn legacy methods was the sweet spot, and there's absolutely nothing stopping us from returning to that.

Absolutely none of us use the Dewey Decimal system, but having to go to libraries and physically walk around pulling cards and finding books built critical thinking.

Typing in "Harry Potter" on a computer and getting a PDF doesn't build any skills.

The human brains biggest strength is offloading and being lazy. If the system thinks it doesn't need skills because they can be offloaded, it just won't learn them. Then at 22-23 when it's harder to learn those skills, gen z is finding out they actually need them.

They can be helped, but what's more important is making sure all those little kids right now start getting real educations again.