It’s important to ask how the very existence of such self-monitoring textbooks would affect the development of students’ critical thinking, even if it succeeds in dealing with their laziness. Being “critical” also means learning how to discriminate between different texts and, occasionally, swimming against the intellectual currents of the time and refusing to read the assigned texts. Not everyone can be a maverick and publicly live up to one’s reluctance to read an obnoxious text—sometimes, resistance is passive and less heroic.
Considering the dangers of software that monitors students’ e-reading, Evgeny Morozov echoes notions of non-reading as intellectual choice on par with reading.
