Dr Jared Cooney Horvath

That has ballooned into 18 years now I've been stuck in academia.

I can never quite get out.

But my whole focus has been, yeah, on the science of learning.

How do human beings learn?

Can we bring that back to schools and say, if this is learning, then what does that mean for teaching?

What does that mean for studying, for the tools we use?

Yeah, and there's no easy way to say it.

Like, you've got to find the nicest way to say that sentence, that our kids are cognitively less developed than we are, but it is just where it is.

So since we've been recording cognitive development, turn of the century, late 1800s into the 1900s,

Every generation outperforms their parents, you name it, on basic IQ, memory, attention, literacy, numeracy.

And we always attributed that to school, that the more kids spent time in schools, the more their general competencies went up.

And it makes sense.

That's where we're cutting our teeth.

And then 2010 rolls around, and all of a sudden, schooling and development decouple.

Kids today spend more time in schools than we did growing up, but all of their scores are down lower than ours.

They're equivalent to us in about 1992 now in literacy, in numeracy, in executive functioning.

All these things have gone down.

And you can't say, look, school didn't change all that much.

Biology didn't change all that much.

So what changed?