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Why Learning Needs Friction in a Screen-Heavy World

22 April 2026 · 58 views · 0 likes · 0 reposts · 127 blog views

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I stumbled on a piece about Jared Cooney Horvath who said that for the first time in modern history, a younger generation is scoring lower than the one before it.

Everything. Attention, memory, literacy, numeracy…

He’s not blaming Gen Z but the environment.

More than half of a teenager’s waking time is on screens. Not just passive screens - fast, fragmented, infinite-scroll screens. The kind that reward quick hits, not deep thinking.

We replaced long reading with summaries. Problem-solving with guided steps. Struggle with smooth UX.

Horvath calls it out in a way I liked: learning needs friction.

Because if you think about it - every real skill you’ve built came from sitting in confusion longer than you wanted to. Reading things twice. Getting stuck. Pushing through.

Now compare that to how most content is consumed today.

Skim. Scroll. Skip. Next.

You don’t stay with ideas long enough for them to actually shape you.

Confidence didn’t drop. In many cases, it went up.

So you get this strange combo: lower measured ability, higher perceived ability.

... but without friction, there’s nothing forcing correction.

The same pattern shows up across dozens of countries once digital tech gets deeply embedded into classrooms and I don’t think the takeaway is "tech is bad". He explicitly says he’s not anti-tech.

We removed too much resistance from the system and brains adapt fast. If the environment rewards speed, they optimize for speed. Depth becomes optional. Then rare.

Reading this made me reflect on my own habits.

Even with books - if I catch myself skimming, I know I’m cheating the process. Or parenting - if you solve every small problem for a kid - they stay calm, but don’t grow. Let them struggle, let them fail.

If you want depth, you have to choose friction. Because the default environment won’t give it to you anymore.

Source: vice.com/en/article/gen…

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