The reading and writing crisis in Norway is a warning to British parents. Following a catastrophic decline in reading ability and willingness to read, the Scandinavian country is abandoning the use of iPads in schools.

Can the United Kingdom learn from this and save a generation from screens? The question was posed by Sunday Times in an editorial on 29 March, after the newspaper identified an area in which the situation is in fact worse in Norway than in the crisis-stricken United Kingdom.

The affluent country introduced iPads for all five-year-olds in 2016, and since then reading proficiency has plummeted. Now 15,000 pupils leave primary school each year without being able to read properly.

Of course, the iPad does not bear all the blame; nor does it help that many schools in the Oslo area have up to 80–90 per cent immigrants among their pupils. Many of these can neither speak Norwegian nor read in their own language.

However, for ordinary Norwegian pupils the use of iPads has had highly negative consequences. I myself have children who were eager readers several years before they began school. It is not difficult to teach children aged 3–4 to read, if they have an interest in it. It takes a couple of weeks with one hour of effort per day.

But after starting school and with the introduction of iPads, much was destroyed: they still master reading and writing, but choose iPads and computer games over books.

The Times does, however, praise Norway for pushing back, and the iPads are now gone (far too late, if you ask me).

Now, each year a book is selected in kindergarten (barnehagen) to prepare children for school.

They do not sit still while being read to. On the contrary: they learn that it is fun to read. The world’s literary superpower—yes, that is us, the United Kingdom—need not allow matters to slide as far as they did in Norway. Our Get Britain Reading campaign has set the ball rolling. Why not join?

“Get Britain Reading” is a campaign launched by Sunday Times on 14 October 2025 with three main objectives:

• Commit to reading for pleasure for at least 10 minutes a day for six weeks
• Make a contribution to Bookbanks to provide books to those who need them most
• Volunteer to read in schools together with Coram Beanstalk

The day before, Matthew Syed wrote in the same newspaper that children imitate their parents, who are obsessed with scrolling through social media. By placing the blame on the major social media platforms, we avoid taking responsibility ourselves.

I am tired of it. Tired of all the misdirected anger aimed at the evil horsemen of the apocalypse: Musk, Zuckerberg, the man who created Twitter, the one who founded Snapchat—all these billionaire demons who imposed upon the world the bewildering technology that constitutes social media, without thinking sufficiently about what it might lead to, who sell their wares like quacks and then retreat to profit from the chaos.

But Syed believes parents cannot escape responsibility by blaming Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

We knew the harm these platforms were causing. We saw how our children stared blankly at their phones, reached for them and sought validation from them; we saw how the algorithms penetrated their souls and undermined their ability to think, to sustain attention, and to develop the social skills that ought properly to be part of adolescence.

Adults have acquiesced in this catastrophe, have looked the other way, often while glued to our own mobile phones, thereby appearing as the worst possible examples.

Parents have ended up like politicians, who are eager to instruct their children (subjects), but lack the ability to lead by good example.

Is it really any wonder that teenagers are addicted to screens, when that is precisely what they have learned from their parents, who scroll through their emails instead of listening to their children?

As Syed writes: it is infinitely sad to see a family out at a restaurant to enjoy themselves, only for two adults and two children to sit around the table staring at a screen. Conversation appears to be an endangered species, which of course does not have a positive effect on children’s development of knowledge.

Approximately 500,000 Norwegians, out of a population of just 5.6 million, are unable to read a text message or simple instructions. Of the 65 countries assessed in the PIRLS survey (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) with regard to children’s enjoyment of reading, Norway ranks last.

Norway lies below the international average, and far below the United Kingdom, in the PISA results for reading. Before the introduction of iPads, the country ranked significantly above both of these levels.

– We are far too wealthy, so we do foolish things with our money, said former Minister of Education (kunnskapsminister) Trine Skei Grande.

She has a point, although ordinary Norwegians are by no means too wealthy, even if the state is awash with money that is spent on all manner of purposes that are not to the benefit of Norwegian taxpayers. It is not ordinary Norwegians who “do foolish things with our money”. That task is taken care of by our politicians.

Many parents, both Norwegian and British, nevertheless appear either unwilling or unable to assume responsibility. As Syed writes:

So why did we not intervene? Why did we not put a stop to this vast experiment in which our children were used as guinea pigs? I believe the reason is both simple and devastating. We did not consider it to be our responsibility.

What kind of parents are we, if we were in fact willing to leave responsibility for our children to former Ministers of Education (kunnskapsministere) such as Tonje Brenna, Gudmund Hernes, Bård Vegar Solhjell, Guri Melby and Trine Skei Grande?

Now it is Kari Nessa Nordtun who is steering the ship, and I must reluctantly admit that I have some sympathy for her, even if it may be undeserved. But she has at least stated that the digitalisation of the school has failed and that the balance between book and screen must improve.

It is not an easy task for parents to keep children away from screen time. It certainly does not become easier when children spend most of their school day in front of a screen.

Fortunately, it appears that this dreadful trend is in the process of being reversed.