Ten-year-old Honey Cooper spends part of the day learning about fractions and the solar system as a fourth-grader at Kimbark Elementary School—and part of it as a dual-enrolled student at San Bernardino Valley College, taking a college-level art class.

“He’s very, very, very bright,” Kimbark Elementary School Principal Brittany Zuniga told a local TV station. KTLA. “He’s dedicated. He’s passionate. He loves to learn.”

The youngest of five, Cooper taught himself how to read early and quickly became a stand-out student at his school. He is performing at a seventh-grade level in math and reading on par with high school seniors, according to his mother. Cooper again began to narrow down his career prospects, seeing a future as a surgeon, artist, or fashion designer.

One of the biggest differences between his two classes, he said, is the size—33 students in the elementary school compared to just 12 in the college—but he finds a rhythm that remains strong.

“It’s really a lot, but if you balance it out, it can be smooth,” Cooper said KTLA.

According to her mother, Honey’s home life is typical—with one exception. As he struggled to clean his room, he avoiding screensphysical books are preferred instead. That puts him at stark contrast to his peers: kids ages 8 to 18 in the US now spend an average of seven and a half hours a day looking at or using screens, according to American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

“One of the great things that I think this whole story really shows is that if you raise the level of the students, they can reach it,” Zuniga added. “And they will even blow your mind and go beyond it.”

If he sticks to the traditional timeline, Cooper will graduate from high school in 2034 and college in 2038.

Reading is on the decline—though it remains the top habit among the most successful

Cooper prefers books the YouTube he was already placed in a shrinking minority.

Last year, two out of five Americans did not read a single bookand reading for pleasure has dropped about 40% in the last two decades. However, many of the world’s most successful people credit reading as central to their curiosity, critical thinking, and leadership. A The JPMorgan survey released last year of more than 100 billionaires found that reading ranked the highest achievement criteria had the same.

Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen an example. He spends two to three hours a day immersed in audiobooks (he switched from physical books after he discovered AirPods). He often rotates between history, biography, and material on new topics such as artificial intelligence.

“When nothing else happens. I always listen to something,” said Andreessen.

Add it up, and Andreessen logs nearly an entire 24-hour learning day each week—shaping the way he invests, builds, and thinks.

Alison Taylor, a professor of business and society at NYU’s Stern School of Business said that the reading fix has become something of a luxury item—rare, valuable, and impossible to fake.

“Having intellectual credibility, being well-read and so on is definitely something that money can’t buy, so it’s the ultimate status symbol,” he once said. luck.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha are falling behind their parents—and technology may be to blame

A 10-year-old taking college courses is often an outlier—but Cooper’s story comes at a fraught moment for American education. Mounting evidence suggests Gen Z and Gen Z Alpha fell behind their parentswith many students performing below pre-pandemic levels.

One in three eighth graders scored “below standard” in reading last year National Assessment of Educational Progress report—the largest in the exam’s three-decade history. Among fourth graders, 40% landed at the low level, the worst showing in 20 years. Mathematics scores follow a same downward trajectory.

For years, edtech has been positioned as the solution, with school districts across the country flying laptops and tablets to students. But according to neuroscientist and former teacher Jared Cooney Horvath, the approach may have backfired.

“This is not a debate about rejecting technology,” Horvath said in testimony before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation earlier this year. “It’s a question of adapting educational tools to how human learning actually works. Evidence shows that the indiscriminate expansion of digital weakens learning environments rather than strengthens them.”

Artificial intelligence adds another layer of uncertainty. While its use is growing among students and teachers, it is uncertain whether there are proper guardrails for learning.

A new one The Brookings report found that the qualitative risks of AI—including cognitive atrophy, “artificial intimacy,” and the erosion of relational trust—currently overshadow the technology’s potential benefits in education.