Doc Brown arrives from the future in search of our intrepid protagonist, Marty. The film is Back to the Future; the year is 1985 (Universal), and the spirit is comedic. The warning remains critical:
"It's your kids, Marty. Something's gotta be done about your kids!"
Not to put too fine a point on it, but our education system has committed a major misstep. Certainly, they were likely enabled and even empowered by well-meaning facilitators, so-called experts, and a raft of helicopter parents. Nonetheless, we are in serious trouble, and the present inflection point will be looked upon as history judges us.
The machines are all around us. There is a growing dependency, and too many are mindlessly walking to their doom and ours. I have striven to warn against the ascent of machines. See Competency for Incompetents (January 2026); More Proof of Idiocracy (September 2025); Indeed Sancho Panza (July 2025); Will the Heimlich be Required (June 2025; We are Regressing (March 2025); Disuse Atrophy (December 2024); Sharing a Drink Called Loneliness (May 2023); Evolution and DNA (November 2022); Are You Innumerate? (July 2018).
There is a great threat to our future. I have seen it, and it is us. We are threatened by our own offspring. No, Doc Brown has not visited me. I have not the power of prescience or prediction. The simple truth is that these screen devices and the pablum of Tick Tock are rotting the brains of our youth.
Fortune reports that the U.S. has invested tens of billions of dollars in the drive to put a screen in the hands of every youth. We have abandoned the tried and true of yesteryear (pronounced "/bʊk/"). We have abandoned the tried and true of "reading, writing, and arithmatic," commonly refered to as the "three Rs," and misspelled "reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic."
Applied Scholastics suggests that we should never have abandoned these three. There is some degree of doubt that any of them are critical in today's digital world. Nonetheless, Applied suggests that in our desertion, we have "students (who) have not been taught the true basics of how to study and learn." There is, arguably, as much value in the learning of "how" as there is in "what."
What has the massive investment in screens since 2002 accomplished? Precisely zero progress. In fact, Fortune reports that for the first time in a century, a generation has "scored lower on standardized tests than the previous one." Yes, Virginia, we have regressions as a replacement for progress.
Let that sink in: "Gen Z is less cognitively capable than previous generations, despite its unprecedented access to technology." To be fair, we have not achieved Idiocracy (2006, 20th Century Fox). To be real, the early symptoms are all around us. Must we end up there to understand?
The Fortune article is quick to assuage feelings. No, the decline of test performance is not necessarily "indicative of intelligence." Nonetheless, test scores "are a reflection of cognitive capability." And capability is on the decline. We have lost the drive for critical thinking. This is described in Screen Time Wins (February 2026), noting "Johnny can't read," and the Sowell conclusion that the real problem is "Johnny can't think."
An inflection point is "a moment when significant change occurs or may occur." In the education of our youth, we have passed several such points and yet face another. Will we put away screens and learn to read, to think, to process, and to express? Or shall we watch another short video of an idiot eating a laundry pod?
Shall we strive to comprehend the subtleties of Hamlet, or watch another short video (or 100) extolling the inherent value of absurdity and stupidity (insert your own definition of each here).
There is correlation demonstrated between time on screens and "dipping test scores." That is not to say time on screens is evil. Spend that screen time effectively. Youth can learn to code, debug, and integrate knowledge. But the short video has to go.
Don't take my word for it. Who knows the "screen-focused world" better than the billionaires who built it? No one. These insiders are acutely tuned to the enticement and even co-dependency of these social media platforms and the screen time they demand. Fortune noted recently that "tech leaders are keeping their own children away."
Why? They don't believe there is strength or value in being an "iPad kid." They are opposed to "short-form content" and believe it is diminishing attention spans and, thereby, intellectual prowess. How much is acceptable? One Tech guru allows his kids "1.5 hours per week of screen time," compared to the national average of "7.5 hours per day."
How do mom and dad get "some peace" without parking the kids in front of an iPad? The same way mom did it in the 70s, when the current harbinger of doom was television pablum delivered in 30-minute doses loaded with ads for sugar bombs and detritus. Drive children to read, to self-engage outdoors with peers, to paint, to build, to create.
No, education is not so complex. The mind likes problems, puzzles, and challenges. They can be found in a multitude of places, degrees, and repetitions. Parents and teachers need only engage them. Communities need only support libraries, egalitarian youth athletics, band, choir, oh, you have heard it all before. This is not an epiphany, merely a return to the tried and true.
Or, we can keep planting the kids in front of digital babysitters that provide incessant, blather, pablum, and mental sedation. AI is so often raised as a bogeyman, but "I have met the enemy, and he is us." The helicopter parents have to calm down. The teachers have to teach. The screens have got to be minimized. The short-form brain acid has to go.
