The great paper U-turn: schools bring books back

Not long ago, the classroom of the future had a tablet on every desk, and Norway, one of the richest countries in the world, was near the front of the queue to build it. “In Norway, we were one of the first countries to say we want to be world-leading in education technology, and we’ve been very proud of that,” Marte Blikstad-Balas of the University of Oslo told TIME in June. Then came the line that made the headline: “But now you see a very sharp U-turn.”

Norway is not the only one turning. Across Scandinavia, the countries that went furthest with screens in the classroom are now spending money to put printed books back on the desks. This is what happened, and why it matters even if your child has never been anywhere near a Norwegian school.

Where Norway started

In 2015, Norway’s fifteen-year-olds were among the best readers in the world. In the OECD’s PISA tests that year they averaged 513 points in reading, ninth in the table and the best reading score Norway had recorded since the tests began in 2000 (OECD, PISA 2015 Results).

And the country kept going down the digital road. According to TIME, Norway’s government had declared the use of digital technology a basic skill in the early 2000s, as necessary as reading, writing and arithmetic, and for the past decade Norwegian pupils have done most of their coursework on tablets and laptops.

Where it ended up

The PISA 2025 results came out this month. Norway’s fifteen-year-olds averaged 453 points in reading, below the OECD average of 461 (OECD, PISA 2025 Results). That is 60 points lower than in 2015.

What do 60 points mean? The OECD reckons that around 20 points is what a typical fifteen-year-old learns in a year at school. It also warns that this rule of thumb should not be applied mechanically, so treat what follows as a rough picture, not a measurement: by that yardstick, Norway’s teenagers lost about three years of reading in a decade. The same report notes that more pupils were left out of Norway’s test this time than last, which may have flattered the result.

Reading fell almost everywhere. Across OECD countries, scores dropped by 28 points between 2015 and 2025. Even so, Norway’s fall was among the steepest in the OECD’s table.

The younger children tell the same story another way. In PIRLS 2021, the international study of children’s reading at around ten, pupils were asked how much they like reading. Norway came last of all 65 countries and regions taking part. Just 13% of its pupils came out as very much liking reading, against an international average of 42% (IEA, PIRLS 2021).

A falling reading score has many causes, and nobody serious blames it all on tablets. But Blikstad-Balas has spent years comparing reading on screens with reading on paper, and her findings point in one direction. When the pupils in her studies read on a screen, she told TIME, “they tended to read faster and do more skim reading.”

Norway turns round

This year, Norway’s government changed course, one step at a time.

From 1 August, the curriculum tells schools to be especially careful with screens for every pupil in years one to four, and digital devices are not to dominate the teaching (Norwegian government). A new national recommendation says pupils in years one to seven should, in the main, have no access to artificial intelligence at school (Norwegian government). And the government has said it will put a law to parliament this year setting a minimum age for social media, with access from the January of the year a child turns sixteen, so that every child is at least fifteen (Norwegian government).

Denmark and Sweden, too

Denmark’s 2024 agreement on its state schools set aside 540 million kroner, roughly £60 million, for books. The point, the education ministry says, is less screen in lessons and more appetite for reading (Danish Ministry of Children and Education). In September 2025, a broad majority of the Danish parliament agreed to put phone-free schools and after-school clubs into law (Danish Ministry of Children and Education).

Sweden began this school year with a national phone ban. Phones are collected at the start of the school day and handed back at the end, for every pupil in compulsory school and in after-school care (Swedish government). It has also been paying schools to buy printed textbooks, working towards what its schools minister called the principle of one textbook per pupil per subject. In 2024 alone the grant was about 658 million kronor, enough for around 1.3 million books (Swedish government).

What it means at home

None of these governments is banning computers, and none of them believes paper is magic. What has changed is the default. For twenty years, the question in a classroom was “why not use a screen?” Now, in the countries that tried hardest, it has become “why use one here?”

It is a useful question at home, too: not as a rule or a ban, but as a habit of noticing. Some things really are better on a screen. Reading a long story slowly, and getting properly lost in it, mostly is not.

And there is a part no ministry can legislate. A law can put a book on the desk. It cannot make a nine-year-old want to turn the page. That happens at home, and usually by accident: a story they cannot stop thinking about, read under the covers after the light should be off, retold at breakfast to anyone who will listen.

Where letters come in

That is the part we work on. A Journee letter comes through the door with a child’s name on the envelope and the next chapter of a story inside, one in which they are the hero, with the people they love written in and a choice at the end that decides what the next letter brings. It is paper, it takes its time, and it gives a child something to wait for. If you want to know why we chose the post over a screen, our page on a screen-free story says more, and how it works has the details.