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this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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sigh. every generation has this article. and even if it was true the failure would still be at the previous generations, because kids can't be blamed for the school system we decide for them or a society thats so anti family that parents barely have time to give attention to their kids.
don't worry gen z: they told the same stuff about us etc. blame generations so we don't see that the real unfairness always was and still is the distribution of wealth.
Every generation literally doesn't is the point? I do think the framing is bad, but the generational decrease, as a cohort, in attention spans, technical literacy, and skills competency has been a major worry for over a decade now. Computer science educators were sounding the alarm on this in the mid and late teens, for example.
Elementary school teachers right now are sounding the alarms over Gen Alpha too. It's catastrophically bad. The education system isn't just flawed or broken, it's actively fucking collapsing. There are a shocking amount of kids now that literally can't read. At all.
The kids are messed up when they get to school - we can’t exclusively blame the education system.
I think that people don’t have time to parent their kids. Everyone i know is stressed and over-committed. People are forced to go back to work way too early in their kid’s development.i live in a country where you get 55% of your income for about a year as parental leave - but even that is not enough. People of my parents’ generation used to toilet train at 18mo because it used to be possible to support a family on one income. that is a rarity these days
Give y’all one guess who’s been defunding more and more, making education more of a hostile worklace, and making it harder for parents to be around or prep their kids.
Here is basically the same article from 2009
It may not be every generation, but this certainly isn't the first
Computer science isn't a fair example to use. Computer science still uses low-level technical skills that has recently been abstracted out from most consumer technogy
That's like the trucking industry sounding the alarm about driving skills because fewer people are driving. Yeah, if the population isn't naturally using those skills in daily life they won't be as good at them
We're not going to rearrange all of how society uses technology just to give the ~1% of younger people going into CS a head start again
You may have a point, but I'm pretty sure Flynn and Horvath are talking about the same phenomenon. Flynn is talking about teens in 2008. Horvath is talking about a phenomenon that started in the mid-2000s. The problem is that because newspeople are obsessed with using generation-based language now, they would rather insert nonsensical implications into their reporting than actually give the starting date Horvath uses in his written testimony.
To be fair, even Horvath brings up "Gen Z" in his speech - but he's bringing it up to a bunch of politicians in a speech. At least he doesn't bring this specific framing up in his written testimony.
To be fair, I might be wrong.
The point has some validity - the presence of an easy solution allows us to avoid internalizing our lessons.
The same was said about my generation (Millenials) because we were allowed to use a calculator. And quite frankly, it’s true - I am less capable of mental calculation than my boomer parents. Now that I have kids I have forced myself to do more in my head or on paper to set an example, and I have improved.
It’s not that their neurons are inferior or that they cannot learn. It’s that it isn’t worth bothering to remember facts or formulae when every little bit of information is a click away.
We had calculators but they have llms and what looks like a failing school system that -at least where I’m from- has been removing a whole lot of traditional calculus / grammar and generally « old style » programs with more participative approaches.
Together with less formal scoring, automatic passing year by year for while, not more Latin or higher math or science to make room for more societal or practical classes.
Much bigger classes, less teachers…
Intuitively I don’t like a whole lot of that. Now I understand that whoever came up with this knows what they are doing but still.
My boomer parents are lead infested and can't do mental math worth a damn.
And it is important to memorize facts instead of looking them up every time because "true facts" become interconnected. You can find any info you want, true or false, but only true facts are interconnected. I recently had someone pull the "democrats supported slavery and the KKK" fact, which is historically true, but ignores that the republicans switched to supporting the bigots when the democrats starting supporting civil rights.
You actually need to retain information and be able to process that information to inoculate against misinformation.