Yes, Children Really Are Getting Dumber
“Most troubling is the decline in the very skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources, and thinking critically about what we read,” the report notes. “The instances of ‘hasty reading’—in which students read quickly but inaccurately—nearly doubled to 9% between 2018 and 2025.”
Adults may be equally guilty of hasty reading, judging by emails that this writer receives. Could Pavlovian ping alerts be fueling a collective attention deficit disorder?
Covid school shutdowns no doubt contributed to the learning loss, though they don’t appear to be the primary culprit, given that scores fell in countries that kept schools mostly open. But there are two common denominators across most countries where scores fell: increasing classroom distractions and reliance on artificial intelligence.
About one-third of students on average in developed countries reported that noise and disorder disrupted lessons, with 29% saying classmates don’t listen to teachers. One in 5 reported that they couldn’t work well because of distractions. Countries where students reported stricter discipline (e.g., Taiwan, Japan and South Korea) experienced small or no learning declines.
