A hark back to old-fashioned learning

A life is shaped not only by its major decisions but by how we use our small, ordinary moments. Growth is rarely dramatic. It happens quietly, by steadfastly engaging with new narratives. But first, we need to put down our phones.

The central paradox of the Information Age is that life is much easier with data at our fingertips, but no one taught us what to do with it. Or, when to turn it off. As David Foster Wallace noted about human beings, we prefer being entertained to being educated. (Representative image/Pexels)

AI Narration

Listen

00:00

4 min readNov 15, 2026 07:07 AM IST First published on: Nov 15, 2026 at 07:07 AM IST

According to a recently published article in The Wall Street Journal, 180 Harvard students competed fiercely for 90 coveted slots in a course called ‘Humanities 10’ that focuses on, believe it or not, reading and literature. To be clear, the surprising surge in demand for the much-maligned, disdained pursuit of the arts isn’t just a clever tactic to pad up a GPA with an easy subject. The daunting syllabus moves through foundational literary and philosophical works covering Homer, Shakespeare and Dante, among others. Digital devices are banned in the classroom; attendance is taken in every lecture; students need to read a book a week and follow it up with essays. In their applications, students expressed the urge to be forced to tackle classics they wouldn’t otherwise read; interestingly, the appeal of ‘Humanities 10’ lies precisely in its difficulty.

At its core, reading isn’t all that different from meditation because it demands the same sublime state of full absorption. Unfortunately, not just students, most of us spend our days distracted, our mind-space and eyes constantly darting between screens. I have found, despite being a lifelong reader, the newspaper is tossed aside because some random person I barely know has posted holiday pictures on Instagram. But before I have time to scroll through them, my WhatsApp is pinging with another depressing forward on Delhi’s pollution. Before I know it, one hour has gone by mindlessly, and the truth is the more that floods in on us, the less anything registers. My solution is to ruthlessly take social media apps off my phone intermittently while thanking my stars that I came of age before the Internet was born. As teenagers we read books like Anna Karenina for fun, not for coursework. If concentration is such a challenge for middle-aged me, it’s alarming to consider how teenagers can ward off the addictive stream of targeted algorithms coming their way.

The central paradox of the Information Age is that life is much easier with data at our fingertips, but no one taught us what to do with it. Or, when to turn it off. As David Foster Wallace noted about human beings, we prefer being entertained to being educated. Scrolling through short reels and memes, or watching others’ glittering lives, provides an illusion of connection. But online interactions lack the nuances of all real-life conversations. Social media has been around long enough for everyone to realise that scraps of news and gossipy tidbits provide a welcome hit of dopamine but also leave us feeling empty and dazed all at once. Clearly though, these ‘Humanities 10’ students are rebelling against the superficial, worried that AI is making them dumber. Real learning needs an ability to identify the essential and eliminate the rest. So they’re choosing deliberate, conscious attention, eager for the reward of slowly perusing a complex text that ultimately reveals something new about the human experience.

Writers across generations have instinctively known that you learn to understand the world only by looking at it closely. The classics prescribed in ‘Humanities 10’, like Hamlet and Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, give us new perspectives on human nature, subversively expanding our ideas of right and wrong. There’s a reason totalitarian regimes censor headlines, ban books and outlaw protests; a story that ignites passionate feelings is ultimately dangerous. For example, initially, Animal Farm reads like an innocent children’s fable; it’s only later that readers realise it’s a scathing critique of totalitarianism. A life is shaped not only by its major decisions but by how we use our small, ordinary moments. Growth is rarely dramatic. It happens quietly, by steadfastly engaging with new narratives. But first, we need to put down our phones.