Textbook Folly
The sensible Swedes have struck a mortal blow against the post-literate future.
Despite my card-carrying liberalism—at least in the old-fashioned and sane sense of the word—I harbour a burgeoning desire for corporal punishment. Pelting miscreants with mouldy tomatoes or rotten eggs seems to me a fun, socially corrective outing.
Every day, whether on the tube, in a pub, or swanning around town, intrusive thoughts command me to smash eggs at strangers. Look around. From man to pig and pig to man, they pollute the airwaves with the demented cackling of their TikTok feeds. They thumb the screen, eyes rapt like improperly dosed mental patients. It’s a scene from the Walking Dead: Con-tent! Con-tent!
You might think it’s none of my business. Oi, Gage! Give it a rest. Have a day off, mate. You could bore a Xanax to sleep. Stop being so judgemental. Live and let live.
I could not agree more. To live and let live is the principle which I hold dear, even if so few agree in 2026. Live and let live is the British default setting. A setting we exported (or enforced depending upon your sensibilities…) to the rest of the world.
Trevor Phillips, the British politico, mentioned this recently in a piece for The Times. Phillips, not one to coat his words in white spirit, added a crucial caveat: Live and let live—but don’t take the piss.
For non-British readers, a quick primer. To take the piss is to mock, to ridicule, or to push a situation beyond the boundaries of fair play. In the British psyche, it is the ultimate social sin: the act of exploiting another’s good nature for one’s own gain.
In the 17th century, before modern chemistry, the destitute collected and sold urine to gunpowder merchants. To ‘take the piss’ meant to worsen an already dire situation. Hence, if you ‘haven’t got a pot to piss in’ you’re flat broke.
Thankfully, we no longer carry around with us buckets of urine, but we still lambast the piss-taker. He is the one who corrupts the British ‘live and let live’ default and cloaks his own insolence behind it.
Here is a prime example of a piss-take. According to primary school teachers, many children shamble through the doors today zombified and crying out for their iPads.
Their parents, lined at the school gates, barely say goodbye, what with the hypnotic drivel spewing from their iPhones.
The kids greet their teachers with the YouTube vernacular: “Hi, guys!” When handed a book, they swipe and tear at the unfamiliar paper. They greet each other with: “Welcome to my channel!”.
Finally, when they leave, they don’t say goodbye. They say: “Remember to like and subscribe!”
I’m not taking the piss. A friend of mine, tasked with civilising these screen-addled sprogs, confirms what one reads in the newspapers. These chirpy little addicts ransack classrooms crying out for more iPad with the fanatical calculation of tweaking crackheads.
Wherever you may sit on the political spectrum, I hope you agree that a functioning democracy might one day need citizens who can read and write, and who can concentrate beyond a ten-second video clip.
At least one functioning democracy agrees. Recently, Swedish politicians reversed their digital-first obsession by announcing a return to paper and pen. The sensible Swedes have gone analogue. Why? Literacy rates in the cosy Nordic social democracy have collapsed.
“We’re actually trying to get rid of screens as much as possible,” said the Liberal party’s Joar Forsell.
Since 2025, pre-schools are no longer obliged to employ digital ‘tools’ and teachers no longer dole out tablets to kids under two. According to Mr Forsell, reading real books on paper does what schools have for decades avoided: it teaches kids to think. Tablets for toddlers is now från skärm till pärm (from screen to paper.)
High school students now drag their textbooks and notepads to classrooms stripped of screens.
The evidence piles up. Researchers found that hyper-digital tablets-for-toddlers eroded basic skills. Writing by hand, Swedish students learned more and retained more. Wiping away digital mandates, Swedish lawmakers promise more handwriting and books, fewer devices, and quiet reading time.
But it’s not just the Swedes.
Psychologists Pam A. Mueller (Princeton University) and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (UCLA) found handwriting beats typing—at least if learning something is your thing. Students who pecked down verbatim notes on their laptops wrote twice as many words as their pen-and-paper classmates. Who learned and remembered more? Take a guess.
How could this be? Writing by hand is slower. You’re forced to process and reframe information in your own words—the art of thinking. Screens hamper this essential process. When we write by hand, there’s a greater connection between the brain and the finger. This act, they say, cements the information in one’s brain. Essentially, the typists transcribed much. They absorbed little. It’s like paying someone else to have sex for you.
Researchers claim that writing on paper improves everything from recalling a random series of words to grasping and understanding complicated or conceptual ideas. Writing by hand ties down the balloons of motor, visual, and sensory memory.
When studying from their notes, the longhand writers did better on tests. This persisted even when the typists were told to rephrase the material into their own words. They didn’t absorb the material. They parroted it, much like ChatGPT doesn’t know that flipping a glass spills water. It merely knows that the words ‘flip’ and ‘glass of water’ are statistically related to the word ‘spill.’
And yet, British schools continue marching to the drumbeat of post-literate doom.
Perhaps the fever has broken or perhaps we have seen nothing yet. In the name of efficiency, we’ve traded the brain for the screen. And we call this folly progress.
I’m not sure about you, but little of the screen-addled modern world appears to be progressing. At least not any place worth progressing towards.
We've been extraordinarily lucky with the 3 schools attended by our boys. The primary was a paper and pen establishment, some screen time was inevitable, but they learned to read using real books (and I read to them every night from books until eldest was 14). The high schools are also paper and pen. There's no sixth form at younger son's school so he'll move for A-levels, hopefully to the school his older brother is at. Also paper and pen. Eldest lugs 3 large ring binders around with him most days, he's studying English, ancient history and business studies. Lots of texts. It's great. Both high schools use exercise books.
I have friends who have kids at "Ipad" schools in town - many of these kids also need glasses from a young age, such is the impact of screens on the eyesight of children. In one family, both the kids need specs, but neither parent does! Bizarre and sad.
There will be a backlash and a retreat from this, as there is already a falling out of love with AI (just not by government - normal people have worked out its considerable limitations but the idiots in charge have no concept of it, its still a shiny new saviour that's going to solve everything from the NHS failures to the housing crisis). But possibly not before we've damaged the life chances of a generation of kids.
I took written notes all through my education including the seminary and I found that even a couple of words would bring beck a concept that had been talked about. I always thought it was because I'd learned it both orally and physically (by writing it down). I tried taking notes with a computer from our speakers at priests conferences and found I didn't remember any better than just by listening.