The Notebook Reboot

Before the semester started, I argued in these pages that Harvard shouldn’t ban AI but instead teach students to use it critically, the way calculators or word processors were once absorbed into learning. That argument felt urgent then; it feels even more now.

When I returned to campus this fall, I found classrooms not only banning AI, but banning technology altogether. “Notebook only,” one syllabus read. No laptops, no tablets, no screens of any kind.

This is a step in the wrong direction. Not because I object to paper—I love the unhurried cadence and slowness of handwriting—but because prohibition is not pedagogy. Harvard’s response to the emergence of new learning tools is to pretend they don’t exist, a stance that not only shapes classroom habits but also risks leaving graduates less fluent in the technologies that will come to define modern work.

I understand the instinct. There is something restorative in the rustle of paper, the weight of ink, and the visible record of thought accumulating in the margins. But the broader trend—AI bans morphing into laptop bans—signals something larger. When confronted with new technologies, Harvard reaches for abstinence. It imagines rigor as removal.

Let’s admit it: notebook-only classrooms can feel better. They create a mood of collective focus that’s hard to replicate on screens. Research has suggested that handwriting aids retention; but even without the studies, most of us sense the difference between scribbling a thought in the margins and typing it into a doc you’ll never reopen.

This instinct feels especially strong in small discussion-style seminars, where the absence of laptops makes the room feel more intimate, every silence more audible, and each page turning into part of the collective rhythm.

Professors, too, find comfort in the ban. It restores a familiar tempo. A seminar without laptops feels less like a Zoom breakout room and more like the classrooms they remember from their own days in school. After years of fractured attention and AI panic, the desire to reclaim space from machines is expected. In some ways, it’s even admirable: a stand against the compulsions of the feed, an insistence that, at least for 75 minutes, students should think unassisted.

But that comfort isn’t universal. For students with handwriting that lags behind lecture tempo, learning differences, or heavy commitments outside of class, a “notebook-only” rule turns strictness into exclusion. What feels restorative to some can feel punitive to others—especially when it means hours spent retyping or reorganizing notes just to keep up.

Harvard and its professors have now staged two retreats: first from AI, then from laptops. What’s striking is that for these reasons laptops had already been widely accepted until just last year; it was the AI panic that made professors double back, extending suspicion to older tools that had once felt settled. Both moves operate on the same logic: protect standards by banning the tool. But restriction doesn’t cultivate judgment; it only drives the tool underground.

Students still write with AI, but just in dorm rooms instead of classrooms. They still rely on laptops, just not when professors are watching. The concerns behind the bans are real. AI can tempt plagiarism, laptops can splinter attention—but rules aimed at erasing those risks end up policing visibility, not behavior.

A false dichotomy underlies this debate: that technology must either corrupt or disappear. But every classroom already runs on technology. The notebook was once disruptive; the chalkboard standardized instruction; PowerPoint reshaped lectures into bullet points. Each tool restructures how knowledge is produced and understood.

The trouble is that Harvard treats only the newest tools—laptops and AI—as suspect. Older tools get rebranded as “innocent.” But none of it is innocent. Every technology amplifies certain forms of thought while muting others. Handwriting slows you down, encouraging synthesis. Typing speeds you up, encouraging transcription. AI accelerates drafting but flattens style. The task of education isn’t to pick one and ban the rest. It’s to make students conscious of those trade-offs.

The return to notebooks is part of a wider cultural mood. Parents ban iPads at dinner tables. Influencers pay for “digital detox” retreats. Silicon Valley executives brag about “screen-free Sundays.” Focus has become the new scarce good. A room without screens signals seriousness the way a phone stack at dinner signals intimacy. These gestures resonate because they promise not just focus, but closeness—an assurance that attention, once so fragmented, can still be shared.

When Harvard translates this cultural nostalgia into policy, it confuses tradition with discipline, defining seriousness not by how students adapt to new tools, but by how faithfully they retreat from them.

There’s wisdom in that impulse. Our lives are saturated with distraction, and carving out slow space matters. But cultivated scarcity isn’t the same as enforced scarcity. When students choose to silence their phones, close their laptops, or step into a library without Wi-Fi, they are learning how to create focus in a noisy world. That act of self-discipline is a skill. A notebook-only rule, by contrast, enforces attention through deprivation. It never teaches how to sustain depth when the laptop is open, the notifications buzzing, the temptation just one click away.

So if prohibition is the easy way out, what would a better—albeit harder—reboot look like?

It would mean treating the classroom as a laboratory for tools, not a refuge from them. Professors could stage comparisons: one week handwritten notes, the next week laptop notes, followed by a reflection on what changed. They could require students to annotate an AI-generated outline, fact-checking each claim instead of pretending AI doesn’t exist.

The point is not to normalize every tool uncritically but to surface their effects. How does your argument shift when drafted on paper versus on Google Docs? How does AI nudge your style in ways you didn’t notice? Those are questions worth teaching. Notebook-only classrooms dodge them.

If Harvard insists on notebook-only rules, it should at least ask: who gets excluded by this version of education? Whose handwriting is judged inadequate, whose processing speed lags, whose labor outside the classroom goes unacknowledged?

To reboot is not to revert to factory settings. It’s to restart with intention. Harvard’s current tech policies conflate the two. A notebook-only classroom feels like a clean slate, but in reality, it’s a nostalgic performance—pretending the world beyond the gates doesn’t exist.

A true reboot wouldn’t mean banning or retreating, but reimagining with purpose.

There is something undeniably beautiful in the hush of a notebook-only classroom, a rare pocket of focus. But beauty alone is not a blueprint. If education is meant to prepare for life beyond Harvard, the task is not to enshrine one medium but to move fluidly among them, with discernment.

The future graduate should be fluent in all three registers: the deliberate pace of handwriting, the collaborative speed of the laptop, and the algorithmic fluency of AI. Anything less leaves us unprepared for the world we already inhabit.

Luke Wagner ’26 (lukewagner@college.harvard.edu) is the Managing Director of the Harvard Independent.