There is something deliciously subversive happening in Sweden.
After years of being the poster child for sleek screens, cashless living and children who can probably code before they can tie their shoelaces, Sweden is quietly rowing back. Physical textbooks are returning to classrooms. The government has committed 685 million kronor (around £50 million) between 2023 and 2025 to ensure pupils have access to printed books again, alongside extra funding to strengthen reading and writing.
Education minister Lotta Edholm was strikingly blunt in interviews: there is ‘clear scientific evidence that digital tools impair rather than enhance learning’ when overused in early schooling. That is not nostalgia. That is national policy.
And I, as someone who still cannot quite make peace with a Kindle, applaud the unfashionable truth: real books make us think differently. It is not just about nostalgia and sniffing the pages of a new book - it is neurological.
When you read on paper, your brain maps the argument spatially. You remember that the killer paragraph was halfway down the left-hand page. You recall that the turning point came just before the dog-eared corner (but never turn those corners down). You feel the weight of what you’ve read. Literally.
In a landmark 2014 study published in Psychological Science, Mueller and Oppenheimer found that students who took notes by hand outperformed laptop note-takers on conceptual questions, even though the typists wrote more. The researchers concluded that handwriting promotes ‘generative processing’ - in other words, thinking.
On a screen, everything floats. Scroll, swipe, skim. The argument becomes meaningless. Scroll, swipe, skim. And for argument retention, this matters enormously. When students plan essays on paper, the structure often holds. When they build them purely in a digital haze, ideas blur. The conceptual spine weakens. Paragraphs drift. And do not even start me on the vanishing capital letters and full stops (I kid you not).
As someone who spends her days coaxing teenagers through Hamlet, Frankenstein and The Handmaid's Tale, I can tell you this: the students who annotate physically think more physically/ And it isn’t just literature, language inserts that remain untouched without even a single underline more often than not points to a student who isn’t getting above that C/D borderline. Typing notes is efficient but unsubstantial. Writing them is intimate and clicks the brain into thinking mode.
There is a reason lawyers still print documents before making final edits. A reason serious editors read proofs in hard copy. The eye behaves differently on paper. It lingers and catches what a backlit glare allows to slide past. And, most crucially, it doesn’t ping you with a message about a cat doing something cutely destructive in a kitchen. There is something profoundly grounding about knowing how far you have travelled in a text. Screens flatten that journey. Every page is page one.
Before anyone accuses me of yearning for quills and candlelight, let me be clear: I teach online. I use shared documents. I love the efficiency of digital tools. But I also insist my students own their texts - my own shelves groan with the weight of them. Annotate them. Argue with them (I have multiple copies of the same text to argue with the different introductions). Spill coffee on them. Because the magic of real books is not aesthetic but cognitive.
Deep reading builds the muscle required for complex arguments. For IB essays that move beyond summary. For A Level responses that do not float but land. For GCSE thinkers trying to turn their arguments into a speech or article. For thinking that connects, layers, synthesises.
Pass me the paperback.
Print out the articles and read at your leisure here:
Guardian article on Sweden’s policy shift:https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/11/sweden-says-back-to-basics-schooling-works-on-paper
Mueller & Oppenheimer (2014) – The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboardhttps://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581
OECD (2021) – 21st-Century Readers: Developing Literacy Skills in a Digital World
I couldn't agree more! If I have to deeply process a document, I will print it off so I have a physical thing to read and make notes on. I have a Kindle and an Audible account, but nothing beats the magic of holding a book - and being able to flip pages back to check on a name or a previous event can also be helpful in your old age 😆