A massive revolt against educational technology in the classroom is under way, especially in certain European nations. Education leaders in some countries have concluded that Ed-tech is the primary reason for declining interest in reading and ability to read.

In the U.S., experts blame declining reading scores on the pandemic, on teachers, or on schools that have not yet adopted the “science of reading.” But even here, some parents and educators have concluded that Ed-tech is the driver of declining interest in reading books. Meanwhile the Ed-tech industry continues to promote their products as the answer, not the problem.

Among the nations that are abandoning ed-tech, Norway is a leader of the pack. In 2016, the schools gave every child a laptop. Since then, Norwegians have seen growing aliteracy and illiteracy. Education leaders decided that Ed-tech was the reason that students lost interest in reading.

Norwegian libraries are the hub of a rebirth in literacy. According to a report in the Sunday Times of England, Norwegian libraries have reinvented their activities to bring back children and teens. They offer roller skating, rap workshops, and–most especially—-books.

To revive Norwegians’ ability to read, the nation is emphasizing reading books and de-emphasizing ed-tech.

Three young boys reading a book together in a library nook.

Children find a nook in Lillehammer’s library as part of the Boklek scheme BARBORA HOLLAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

There are 1,100 chairs in the main public library in Oslo — rocking chairs, armchairs, chairs on balls which let you spin yourself around. Every one is full.

When the Deichman Bjorvika library opened in 2020, staff quickly realised they needed teenagers’ ideas about how to attract young people. “When we used to arrange free pizza evenings on our own, nobody came,” said Mariann Youmans, head of Deichman Young. 

Their ideas? Workshops to clean your trainers and write rap lyrics, chess tournaments and parties where you rollerskate around piles of books.

The theory is that the teenagers, who are paid about 187 Norwegian krone (£14.50) per hour to sit on the council for two hours a week, invite their friends; the library becomes a place that they know and like, and gradually they start borrowing books.

They held 1,000 events last year — and lent a record 2.2 million books across Deichman’s 23 libraries in the Norwegian capital. About 50 per cent were to children. It is books by the back door. 

Welcome to the latest chapter in Norway’s attempts to reverse its catastrophic decline in reading. It might have one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds — about £1.5 trillion, and rising by the day — and the highest percentage of electric car sales — 96 per cent — but Norway, temporarily, forgot about the importance of books.

Around 500,000 Norwegians, in a population of only 5.6 million, cannot read a text message or simple instructions. Of the 65 countries measured for children’s enjoyment of reading by Pirls (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study), it comes bottom.

“We are far, far too rich, so we do stupid things with our money,” said Trine Skei Grande, the former education minister, now director of the Norwegian Publishers’ Association.

In 2016, the “stupid thing” was to give an iPad to every child when they started school at the age of five. It had no parental controls on it, and the parents who complained were ignored, dismissed as “dinosaurs”. Books disappeared from classrooms. Children stopped reading.

Norway is below the international average, and far below Britain, in the Pisa reading scores, compiled by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). Before the iPads were introduced, it was significantly above both of them. 

Such children were left, Skei Grande said, with what she described as “kitchen language”, a vocabulary for only the ordinary things in life, perhaps 17,000 words, rather than a bookworm’s 55,000-70,000.

But the fightback has truly begun. The prime minister, Jonas Gahr Store, vowed to make Norway into the best country in the world for reading. “Norwegian children used to be among the best readers in the world. But today, 15,000 pupils finish primary school without being able to read properly. That is serious,” he said, at the launch of a national reading initiative last August.

A reading commission was set up by the government in January. There are 13 experts on it, including two authors, who will report later this year. Skei Grande said there is political consensus across Norway’s parliament to resolve the problem. “We have no representative of Donald Trump saying: ‘I love the uneducated’. I’m happy with that,” she said.

Money is being poured into new strategies to get children reading again — and adults, constantly staring at their phones, are being targeted too.

An initiative, from Foundation Read, will encourage workplaces to set up book clubs for their staff, or at least to have a shelf of books that staff can exchange with each other. Nearly 30 companies have signed up.

Silje Brathen, from Foundation Read, said: “We need children to see their parents reading because why should they be forced to read if their parents are never doing that?” IPads have been removed for the first three years of school, and mobile phones banned for all ages.IPads have now been removed for younger schoolchildren.

There are summer reading competitions during the eight to nine-week holiday which begins in the middle of June, just as the sun barely sets in Norway.

Every child is encouraged to log their reading — cartoons and newspapers, as well as novels — and then to go to the library to pick up a prize to reward a milestone, such as getting to page 50. The shark tooth that children were given proved particularly popular one summer.

Helene Voldner, from the Norwegian Library Association, said: “Last summer, a library in Haugesund [a coastal town in the southwest of Norway] completely ran out of children’s books because so many wanted to take part.”

In Lillehammer, about two hours by train north of Oslo, an initiative, called Boklek, which translates as “book play”, was born, the brainchild of Marit Borkenhagen, festival director of the Norwegian Festival of Literature.

In the months before they start school in August at the age of five or six, every kindergarten class is invited to visit the local library. 

Each year, one book is chosen, and the author, or a storyteller, comes to the library to read the story to the children, but also to play games linked to it. This year’s book is Det Runde Problemet by Vegard Markhus about a boy called Robert who loses his head.

At 10am in the library on Wednesday, there were 47 children listening to the story, with their 12 teachers, all sitting in socks, not shoes, in the children’s section. At midday, there were another 59 children from other kindergartens.

They do not listen silently. They were encouraged, by the storyteller, Kristine Haugland, to get involved — patting their head to check it is still there, and counting the number of socks on Robert’s messy bathroom floor. Kristine Haugland of Boklek keeps children enthralled at the library in Lillehammer BARBORA HOLLAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

It is reading, but not the quiet, dull type that puts off so many children. The aim is to show the children, and their teachers, how reading can be fun. 

The same book is read to all children that year, and a copy given both to their kindergarten and their new class at primary school. It is designed to make them feel comfortable when they make the move to big school. 

Mia Granum, a Boklek co-ordinator, said: “When I was a child, we all watched the same TV. We had a lot more in common with each other. It’s important to have something comfortable that is familiar to everyone. The Boklek book gives them this.”

For Sarah Willand, director of one of Norway’s oldest and biggest publishers, Cappelen Damm, the decline in reading — but the newfound determination to reverse the problem — means she describes herself as a “concerned optimist”.

She said: “We are concerned that both people — children and adults — are reading less … It is not enough that books exist. They must be read or heard.

Next month, Norway will be the guest of honour at the annual Children’s Book Fair in Bologna, Italy, with dozens of events organised by Norla (Norwegian Literature Abroad). 

Back in Oslo, Deichman Bjorvika — all 19,600 square metres of it — has five 3D printers, six sewing machines, and a scheme to hand out seeds to visitors. The architect designed the five-storey building — or ten if you include the five mezzanines — to look like a forest. If you look up, you see light coming in through the glass roof. Oslo’s central library, Deichman Bjorvika. The five-storey building opened in 2020.

To open the library, streets were closed, royalty invited, and little children — with rucksacks of books on their backs — walked from the old library to the new building. “We wanted the first inhabitants of the new library to be children. We wanted to show them the way,” said Youmans.