Going Old-School on Purpose

A small movement of professors is bringing back paper books and reading aloud. It seems old-school until we recognize productive friction as a key element of cognitive science.

Here’s the recipe: a paper book, a slow voice, and a room where nobody can hide. Thirty years ago, that was just called class. Now it reads as radical, and the professors running it are experimenters testing the variable of friction.

As educators, we spent twenty years optimizing friction out of school. Shorter readings, smoother interfaces, answers just a search away. Remove the obstacles, the thinking went, and learning flows. I won’t pin the whole decline on the smoothing; phones, a pandemic, and two decades of test policy left their marks, too. But the record is in, and it isn’t kind. Students can decode every word and yet lose the thread of a long argument. They arrive at college, Rose Horowitch reported in The Atlantic in 2024, “bewildered” by the expectation of finishing whole books. (The word belongs to Columbia’s Nicholas Dames.) Does this bother you as much as it bothers me?

So, a counterculture is forming around one insight: some friction is not an obstacle to learning; some friction helps to produce the learning. A paper book is harder to skim, which makes it easier to actually read. Reading aloud is slower, so the difficult sentences and passages can’t be skipped. Working through a text together makes confusion public, and public confusion is survivable. For PublicSource, Jamese Platt profiled Pittsburgh faculty who read passages aloud, line by line, and have students write their own questions before class begins. No one can hide in the silence; that’s a skillful design.

Cognitive science got there thirty years ago. In 1994, the UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork named the pattern desirable difficulties, and the lab results since have leaned lopsided in one direction. Studying that feels easy, rereading the highlighted page, produces memory that fades by Friday. In contrast, studying that feels like a struggle, generating an answer from scratch, wrestling with a passage before being told what it means, produces understanding that stays. Ease is a feeling, not a learning outcome. The students who feel most fluent quickly are often learning the least.

The methods are more precise than paper, good; screens, bad. At the University of Pittsburgh, the sociologist Hillary Lazar pairs stronger and weaker readers in what she calls a one-room schoolhouse, so that comprehension happens out loud, between people, rather than failing silently in private. Call it what it is: the exact effort that reading requires, measured out, and stirred back in by hand.

Here’s my claim, stated plainly. The effort was never the bug; it was the mechanism. Take the difficulty out of reading, and we don’t get easier learning. We get the look of reading without the cognition that made it worth anything.

One objection deserves a straight answer because, no doubt, friction can be a barrier. For instance, the dyslexic reader needs the audiobook, and the working parent needs the flexible format. The boundary that matters runs between the friction in access and the friction in the text. Clear the first completely, but guard the second, because the productive struggle is what helps us learn.

And one caveat the movement’s admirers tend to skip: nobody has published outcomes data on these classroom practices. There are decades of laboratory evidence for the principle, a handful of professors applying it on purpose, and data I’m watching for, but that is not here yet.

Still, I find this counterculture hopeful—and I don't get to say that often on this beat, where most of what crosses my desk is decline. The story of rediscovering deep reading is a bright spot precisely because it isn't a platform. It won't scale or break like one, either. Good. Let the tech titans go target something other than a core function of civil society.

Deep reading was never going to come back by removing effort; it comes back by designing the right kind of effort, and perhaps more importantly, by valuing that effort. The professors who went old-school looked most closely at where we are and decided that the way forward runs through the difficulty, not around it. Even though the ingredients look like 1990, the recipe is the most forward-looking thing on campus: a paper book, a slow voice, and a classroom where nobody can skip the thinking.

A question for the comments: what’s one piece of useful friction, in reading or anything else, that you’d put back if you could?

Read deeply,

Dr. Genevive