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.

Hillary Lazar pairs her students two to a book. She is a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh, and in her classroom the reading happens out loud, in the room, at a pace set by whoever is holding it. Editorial intern, Jamese Platt, reported the method for PublicSource in March 2026. It is not nostalgia and it is not a stunt. It is a response to something measured: Rose Horowitch reported in The Atlantic in 2024 that students now arrive at selective colleges bewildered by the demand to finish a whole book—a word supplied to her by Columbia's Nicholas Dames, who has taught the same required humanities course for many years.

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. The effort was never the bug; it was the mechanism. Take the difficulty out of reading, and we get the look of reading without the cognition that made it worthwhile.

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.

Robert Bjork named the principle in 1994 and called it desirable difficulty: the conditions that make learning feel worse are frequently the conditions that make it last. Lazar did not cite him when Platt asked why she does it this way. She said:

“I don’t think it’s that our students are becoming less capable and competent. I don’t know if they have the right training or that the right level of expectations being put on them.”

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