This generation was not handed the same software as their teachers. Those born in the tail end of Generation Z, or already within Generation Alpha, grew up in a world where arranging an afternoon with friends cost one message rather than a week of coordinated phone calls, where memorising a phone number had stopped making sense before it was ever needed, where the shared discipline that ordered their parents’ classroom had dissolved before they ever walked into one. Nobody asked them whether they wanted that world. It was handed to them complete, comfort included, and the figures are already starting to show what the other half of that bill costs. The diagnosis that follows is not new in substance, what has changed is the exact scale at which it now applies, an entire generation rather than an isolated minority.
The software nobody ever had to install
Fanny Demeulder has spent years standing in front of Belgian teenagers, and she says it plainly, this generation is no less sharp than the ones before it, it simply does not run the same software. Memorisation, organisation and discipline never arrived through genetic inheritance or moral virtue. They arrived because daily life demanded them for social survival, and that demand disappeared before this cohort was even born.
The usual explanation hands out blame. To primary school teachers, who supposedly did not teach well enough. To parents, who supposedly failed to set limits. Or directly to the generation itself, accused of laziness. Demeulder dismisses all three versions in a single sentence, this has nothing to do with who did or did not do their job, it has to do with the complete disappearance of the conditions that used to build that skill without anyone needing to teach it explicitly.
She illustrates it with a domestic example. Going to the cinema with friends at twelve years old meant, thirty years ago, buying a paper programme, building a telephone chain of arranged calls, fixing a day and a place with no room for improvisation, because a mistake could not be fixed with a last-minute message. That imposed logistics trained, without anyone intending it, memory and the capacity to plan. Today a WhatsApp group solves in five minutes what once took a full week of coordination. The problem is not the group’s efficiency, it is that the week used to train something the group never does.
The comparison Demeulder reaches for is uncomfortable, which is exactly why it works. In the same way most adults today would no longer know how to light a fire by striking pyrite against stone, though their great-grandparents did it without thinking, these young people cannot memorise long stretches of information because they never had to, not for a single day of ordinary life. It is not a character flaw, it is the elementary logic of any human skill, whatever survival demands gets trained, and whatever stops being demanded atrophies. Thirty years ago, the twelve-year-old who arrived in class without that memorisation software already installed usually ended up steered toward a short vocational track, a silent filter that operated without ever needing a name. Today that filter no longer sorts out a lagging minority, it describes an entire generation, and that changes the nature of the problem. It stops being an individual exception the school can compensate for case by case, and becomes the norm the entire school system has to redesign.
One clarification is worth making before going further. The term Generation Alpha, coined by the Australian consultancy McCrindle, strictly designates people born between 2010 and 2024. What Demeulder describes begins earlier, in the final stretch of Generation Z. The exact boundary matters less than the condition both share, never having known a childhood before the algorithm, which is why this piece treats the two generations together, without pretending to a demographic precision the phenomenon itself does not respect.
A recent study published in Nature revisits an idea that circulates as though it were settled fact, that this generation’s capacity for concentration has biologically shrunk in front of a screen. That is inaccurate. The available research shows that intrinsic attentional capacity has not declined, what changed is the competition for that attention, now ferocious, engineered by companies that bill in exact proportion to what they manage to capture. This cohort’s brain works the same as anyone else’s. What it never had was the training that used to come included, free of charge, in a childhood that required organising oneself without anyone doing it in one’s place.
The practical consequence already shows up in European classrooms. When an entire generation shares the same code of discipline, that code needs no explaining, it transmits itself by social osmosis. When that code stops being shared, as is happening now, the only alternative is to teach it explicitly, one behaviour at a time, something no school curriculum considered twenty years ago because it had never been necessary.
What can already be measured in the classroom
What began as a staffroom anecdote already shows up in the official numbers. The PISA test, which measures fifteen-year-olds’ skills every three years across dozens of countries, recorded in 2022 the sharpest drop France has seen since the measurement began, with a fall of 21.5 points in mathematics between 2018 and 2022, according to the French education ministry itself. It is neither an isolated case nor a purely French problem. Most OECD countries fell in the same cycle, in precisely the years the phone became inseparable from childhood.
The share of fifteen-year-old French students below the minimum competency level in mathematics rose from 22.4% in 2012 to 29% in 2022, while the share of high-performing students fell from 13% to 7% over the same period, the first statistically significant drop among top performers since 2003. (French Ministry of National Education, DEPP, PISA 2022)
Teachers did not invent that figure. They were describing it before it existed.
The screen exposure behind those numbers is not evenly distributed either. A Santé Publique France study, using 2022 data published in 2025, found that among children aged nine to eleven, 73% of children from the least educated families exceed two hours of screen time daily, against 39% of children from the most educated families. The gap appears as early as preschool and holds steady with age. The whole generation inherits the same missing software, but not every member inherits it in the same dose.
The cost that never shows up on a report card
The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt documented, in The Anxious Generation, the same temporal break that separates a childhood shaped by necessity from a childhood shaped by the screen, and places it between 2010 and 2015, exactly when the smartphone stopped being an adult object and became a fixture of Western adolescence. Anxiety, depression and self-harm curves among teenagers begin climbing right there, across several countries at once, with a synchrony no purely local explanation manages to justify.
The mechanism Haidt describes works on three fronts at once. It reduces real social interaction, replaced by mediated contact that multiplies messages while thinning out their substance. It disrupts adolescent sleep, a stage in which sleep performs functions no stimulant can replace. And it fragments the sustained attention that the classroom still demands, even as the rest of the day no longer trains it at any other point.
In Switzerland, where this piece is published, the 2022 JAMES report measured that young people aged twelve to nineteen spend close to four hours a day on the phone alone, not counting computer or television. Four hours is more time than most adults devote to any single voluntary activity in their day. This is, moreover, an age group still building, quite literally, the architecture of its own brain. Comparable figures recur across Western Europe, from the United Kingdom to Germany, wherever a similar survey has been run, which suggests the mechanism is not a Swiss peculiarity but a structural feature of the platforms themselves.
Adulthood does not absolve, it prolongs
The diagnosis does not close with the last year of school. The Swiss army, which receives thousands of young people fresh out of that same school every year, has started documenting something similar from the inside, at an age where the country still expects a mandatory encounter with structure and hierarchy.
More than ten thousand recruits abandon military service in Switzerland every year, the army’s psychological service recorded 1,169 consultations in 2024 and around 60% of those who attend acknowledge difficulties facing the physical and mental demands of training, while requests to the military chaplaincy have doubled over the past decade. (SonntagsZeitung, cited by Blick, June 2025)
A career officer quoted in that report avoids the word indiscipline and prefers to speak of a shifting relationship to authority, young people who arrive demanding that every order be explained before they obey it. That is a more generous reading than Demeulder’s, and probably a more accurate one. The problem was never willpower, it was never having had to negotiate with an authority that did not explain itself.
The same thing shows up, in different vocabulary, in human resources departments. A European survey published in January 2025 among a thousand hiring managers across five countries found that 41% consider this generation less motivated, 42% see it as less committed to the company and 55% find it harder to retain. None of those three figures measures discipline in the strict sense, they measure something adjacent, and they should not be made to say more than they do. But they point in the same direction as the barracks and the classroom.
What can still be rebuilt
The organisation and discipline this cohort lacks is not a factory defect. It is a muscle nobody had to exercise because life no longer demanded it, and an unused muscle can still be trained, even if it now costs more than when it used to install itself, unasked.
Rebuilding it does not mean piling on another hour of homework, or banning phones by a decree nobody will respect. It means what is already being tried in some European classrooms, teaching explicitly what once transmitted itself alone, organising a week before organising a term, memorising a poem before memorising a formula, practising waiting before demanding the instant response the rest of the day still delivers on tap. It is slow work, and nobody has yet shown that it works at the scale of an entire generation.
Nobody in this story asks this generation to feel guilty for a childhood it did not choose. It is asked something else, to stop believing that memory, order and consistency are traits of an era that has passed, because the figures gathered here show precisely the opposite. They are still what decides who finishes military service, who keeps their job once the novelty of a first contract wears off, and who reaches forty without ever having learned, late and by force, what used to be learned early and for free.
Fanny Demeulder says it from a Belgian classroom, but the sum this generation will have to work out is not abstract, it belongs to every individual who makes it up. It begins on the day each one decides whether to keep letting an algorithm organise their time, or to learn, however late, to do it themselves…
G.S.
Sources
- Are attention spans really shrinking? What the science says
- PISA 2022, la France ne fait pas exception à la baisse généralisée des performances
- Note d’information PISA 2022, DEPP, ministère de l’Éducation nationale
- The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt, Les Arènes
- JAMES 2022 report, ZHAW, project management
- The army and Gen Z, a difficult relationship, Blick
- Swiss army staffing 2025, the challenge of early departures, DDPS
- Generation Z and work, employers’ perceptions, IntoTheMinds
- Generation Alpha, McCrindle definition, Wikipedia
- Fanny Demeulder, John Rizzo, School’Up
