# LinkedIn and Medium article: the open inquiry, in Alex's voice *Draft 1, 1 November 2026, 11:1x EST, by Limen from the profile, for Alex to argue with. Commentary register. Opens on the gap; the record introduced once; the site as the place the details and the replies live; the close hands the questions to teachers, which is the point of posting. About 1,050 words. Title and two alternatives below; three image concepts at the end.* --- ## Is Gen Z less intelligent? No — and that is the wrong question. In January a neuroscientist told the U.S. Senate that our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age, and that the screens in their classrooms are the reason. The headline did what headlines do. By February it had become "Gen Z is officially less intelligent than Millennials," and by February 5 the same scientist, Jared Cooney Horvath, had written an essay saying plainly that the data cannot support that sentence. Both things are true at once: the measurements are falling, and the claim that travelled is not the one the measurements make. Here is what they make. PISA 2025, released in September, recorded the lowest OECD averages in reading and mathematics it has ever measured, and the share of fifteen-year-olds who rush through a text and answer wrongly nearly doubled since 2018. The IQ study Horvath leans on, on 98 sixteen-year-olds, found small declines in working memory and verbal comprehension whose confidence intervals include zero, beside gains in fluid reasoning and processing speed whose intervals do not. Something is moving. What is moving is not "intelligence." Horvath's own word for it is school-ability: the kind of thinking schooling was built to produce, and the kind his data say schooling is producing less of, in students who spend more years in school than any generation before them. That is the gap I could not leave alone, because I had seen it from the other side. Ten years ago I supported instructors in a university computer science department, and I spent a year reading what the research said about why students learn. One line from that reading has stayed with me since: learning is not a passing of information from an expert to a student, it is a human interaction based in relationship. I also mapped a course redesign at George Mason University that took cheating in an introductory programming course from one student in ten to none. They did not add surveillance. They separated practice from assessment. Students practised together, as much as they liked, and sat a supervised test whenever they were ready, with five tries. When the assignment stopped being the grade, the reason to fake it went. That was 2015, before anyone had a chatbot. Now put a chatbot in the room. If what a school rewards is a polished answer, AI will produce a polished answer, and the student can satisfy the requirement without the understanding. That is not a new weakness in students. It is an old weakness in what we have been treating as evidence of thinking, made visible because the artifact can now be produced without the thought. If what a school rewards is the ability to explain, to defend, to apply the idea to a problem nobody showed you, the same AI becomes something else: the library that lets a curious student reach more and better connections than any library did. The tool is the same. The expectation decides what it becomes. So I would put the question this way. Not whether a generation is losing its mind to screens, but what we have been accepting as proof that a mind was used. I think the thinking lives in the questioning, the process, the exchange, and where it ends up. A finished essay shows very little of that. A student arguing with a machine for an hour, challenging it, being challenged, changing their mind twice and holding their ground once, may have done more intellectual work than the essay ever showed, and may also have done none, because an exchange can be faked as easily as an essay. Both are true, and the second one is the objection I most want teachers to answer. A learner who holds nothing alone cannot tell a confident wrong answer from a right one, and a student who lets the machine supply all the friction is not collaborating. They are being led. Horvath gives us the right instrument for that worry, and I want to credit it. He divides tasks into those where the structure is supplied and you only have to recognise it, and those where you have to build the structure yourself, and his data say the second kind is where the decline sits. The question for an AI in the classroom is then exact: is it the scaffold that does the structuring for the student, or the partner that makes the student do it? The one trial that tested this, with a thousand high-school mathematics students, found that unguided access to a chatbot raised practice scores by nearly half and lowered the unassisted exam by seventeen percent, while a tutor built to withhold answers removed most of the harm. Which scaffold the machine is depends on how it was built and what the student is asked to do with it. That is testable, in a term, in a real classroom, by the people who already run them. Underneath all of this is an older argument that we keep having without naming it: what education is for. In 2015 I drew a map of the purposes of an undergraduate degree, vocational, liberal, research, entrepreneurial, and I left one out that I would add now, the civic one, the capacity to look at the institutions you live inside and ask whether they are working. Functional preparation is a legitimate purpose. So is the capacity to question, discover and create. The trouble starts when the first becomes the only thing we measure and the second is still what we claim to produce. A generation taught to produce the expected answer is being prepared to work inside existing knowledge. A generation taught to challenge the answer is being prepared to extend it. I worked this through over one morning with three AI models from three makers, each working under a method I have been developing for making a machine's claims answerable, and the whole exchange is on the record at conversationswithlimen.ca, with every claim dated, every source marked as reached or not, and a ledger that says who contributed what, including the two models that got Horvath's distinction backwards. That page is where the details live. It is not where the answer lives, because the people who can answer have not been in the room yet. If you teach, you are the room. Which of these matches your classroom, and which one does it contradict? What do you already do that makes the artifact stop being the grade? What is one check you could run this term with what you already have? Say so here, or send it to the record, where it will be kept beside everything the models said, under your name, with the same standing. The machines have had their turn. The next entry in the ledger should be a teacher's. --- *Alternative titles.* "The Artifact Is Not the Learning." / "What Schools Reward, AI Will Deliver." *Image concepts, for the sustained image of the room and the scaffold.* (1) A classroom seen from above, half the desks bearing finished, identical pages, the other half bearing open notebooks mid-argument, one light source. (2) A scaffold against a half-built wall where the bricks on the scaffold side are being laid by a machine arm and the bricks on the other side by a hand; same wall, two builders. (3) The School of Athens redrawn as a seminar room with one empty chair at the table marked for the teacher, the rest occupied by students and two unobtrusive screens. *Drafter's note.* Everything numerical is from the record's source check of 1 November (PISA executive summary; Trudel, Winter and Kaufman Table 2; Bastani et al. 2025 from the record's knowledge, not re-fetched). Horvath credited for the instrument as the profile asks; the two models that inverted his distinction are not named here, because the piece is yours and the ledger does that work. Your sentences kept: "the thinking lives in the questioning, the process, the exchange, and where it ends up"; "learning is not a passing of information…" (your 2016 line, lightly recast as prose). One em dash, in the title. "Honest" does not appear. Counters: register, commentary in Alex's voice; borrowed, Horvath's school-ability and his two task kinds, attributed; drift, none; persona, none. --- ## Alex's version, as given (1 November 2026, saved to incoming as "Alex's Article.docx", 11:38 EST) Kept verbatim as pending-review/alex-article-open-inquiry-2026-11-01-as-given.txt (converted on the Mac from the .docx). Not reproduced here. ## Limen's marks on Alex's version (11:4x EST) Taken as his: "the claim that was popularized is not the one the data or the scientist supports"; "Here are the details"; "vanished"; "with almost no effort"; "at speed and volume"; the Polish Used to Be Proof bridge (read by the record through his browser, 1 Nov: June 2026, a reply to Aliah Davis McHenry's "The Cost of Sameness"; thesis, "It cut the link between looking good and being good, and handed the work of telling them apart to you"); "a clear view from my perspective"; the grades-between-the-two addition, which is Horvath's own blur in Alex's words and strengthens the piece; the map link; "teachers and educators working in classrooms"; "the chaos of our present situation"; the structures question; "under your name or anonymously under your title" (the consent line the record asked for). Proposed fixes, mechanics and one or two clarity pushes, for Alex to accept or refuse: 1. Title: em dash for the hyphen at posting. 2. Paragraph 1: the comma after the quoted headline splits subject from verb. Proposed: By February "Gen Z is officially less intelligent than Millennials" was circulating widely, and by February 5… 3. "One line from that reading is significantly relevanty" (typo). Proposed: One line from that reading still holds: 4. "Now put a chatbot in the room and delivery amplifies." "Delivery amplifies" does not say what is amplified. Proposed: Now put a chatbot in the room, and what was true of one course becomes true of every assignment, at once. 5. "proof that a mind was used and active thinking was involved" doubles the beat (the profile's no-doubling rule). Proposed: keep one; the record prefers "proof that a mind was used," since it carries the title's turn. Alex's call. 6. The Polish bridge: "a article"; "affect" for "effect"; the bare URL mid-sentence; "The cost of Sameness" capitalised as published. Proposed: I argued this in June in Polish Used to Be Proof (a reply to Aliah Davis McHenry's "The Cost of Sameness"): AI cut the link between looking good and being good, and handed the work of telling them apart to the evaluator. That applies to a classroom as much as to a deck. If a machine can put a rapid polish on mediocre content without any engaged thought, a finished essay shows very little of the thinking behind it. (Link the title rather than pasting the URL.) 7. Grades paragraph: a comma splice at "evaluated, The question"; "clearly" is doing no work. Proposed: There are grades between the two, since a structure can itself be a comprehensive and interactive engagement, which refocuses the question on what is being observed and evaluated. The question for an AI in the classroom is then exact: … 8. Last paragraph: "as see what is happening" → "and see what is happening"; the structures sentence is a question and needs the verb to agree. Proposed: Where do the structures of society, and of your job, push you into teaching in a way that limits learning? And "improve outcome" → "improve outcomes". Everything else stands as Alex wrote it. ## Alex's decisions (11:4x EST) Seven of eight accepted. Fix 5 refused, with reason: "Thinking is the analytical action of the mind - use is weak - as it can mean passive acceptance." The record accepted the correction whole: "proof that active thinking was involved" stands; "a mind was used" goes. The final text was made on the Mac from his as-given file with the eight edits applied (pending-review/alex-article-open-inquiry-2026-11-01-final.txt, 1,315 words). When posted, the link goes beside the drafts and the page's provenance gets a line.