In the 1970s, Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading, or USSR, arrived as an uncomplicated good. A child, a book, time. The premise felt almost pastoral: remove noise, remove pressure, remove instruction, and reading will do what reading does. The library seemed neutral, benevolent, even generous. No one called it Soviet Reading, though the acronym hovered there anyway, a small joke that also hinted at discipline, conformity, and a faith in systems.
What could go wrong was not visible from the outside.
For me, reading was labor as much as pleasure. I read each word silently to myself, one after another, sounding it out inside my head. I listened for meaning like it was a garbled recording, adjusting, repeating, waiting for coherence to settle. My eyes moved forward, but my mind often looped back. Sentences required negotiation. Paragraphs demanded stamina. Silence amplified the effort. There was no external rhythm, no shared pacing, no exchange to confirm that I was following along in the sanctioned way. Forty-five minutes could feel like endurance, a long interior rehearsal where comprehension had to be built word by word without showing the strain.
And still, I loved reading.
So long as I read the French version, I could read Tintin during USSR. Tintin, the boy reporter, and Milou gave me a way into story that did not rely only on linear decoding. Meaning arrived through panels, gesture, recurrence, and motion. I could reread without penalty, linger without falling behind. The work remained, but it moved differently. The page offered handholds. I could keep learning without pretending it was easy.
At ten, I did not have language for dyslexia. I only knew that reading could feel like escape and exertion, and that both could coexist with genuine longing. I wanted to know the world. I wanted to understand how things fit together. Reading was the path everyone pointed toward, even when the path required careful, sustained effort just to remain on it.
In my family, reading was not a hobby. It was a civic posture. No one had the nerve to admit they did not read when no one was watching. I grew up among an abundance of newspapers. The Kansas City Star in the morning, the Kansas City Times in the evening. The Christian Science Monitor. The Wall Street Journal. And, as a treat, the New York Times sometimes on Sunday. Anything in print carried the aura of fact. Ink made claims feel inevitable. Looking back, I recognize a modern confidence in knowable truth, a belief that information, once acquired, could settle the world.
Even then, I suspected the story was messier. I grew up in an era when light could be both wave and particle, an idea diffused through school and media until it became a shared metaphor for paradox. I wondered, with a child’s seriousness, if something like light could be two different things, what then were our thoughts? How did we make meaning of what we read? Could a news article, analogously, behave like wave and particle, both field and fragment, both atmosphere and object?
USSR taught me, without intending to, how schooling stages learning. It taught me how silence can function as invitation and test. It taught me how performance can masquerade as comprehension. It taught me how difficulty often goes unnamed when it looks like compliance. The child who sits still with a book appears successful. The labor stays hidden. The room stays quiet. The institution reads the body and assumes it has read the mind.
That is the quiet problem at the heart of sustained silent reading: it offers time, but it can withhold recognition. It can protect reading, and it can erase the reader.
Ann Berthoff helps clarify what is at stake. Across her work, she insists on a simple claim with sharp consequences: meaning is not transmitted, it is made. Reading is not reception. It is interpretive labor. Words do not carry meaning like sealed containers. They prompt it. They require the reader to form, test, revise, and re-form understanding as language unfolds. In that frame, the visible signs of reading, stillness, endurance, compliance, become a poor proxy for what matters. Mistaking those signs for understanding is not just an error. It is a category mistake.
Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading offers a complementary lens. Meaning does not sit inside a text waiting to be extracted by the correct tool. Meaning emerges through a situated interaction between reader and text, shaped by purpose, context, attention, and prior experience. The same words become different texts in different hands. Reading is not an intake valve. It is an encounter. The reader’s stance, whether aesthetic, lived, felt, or efferent, oriented toward information, changes what the text becomes.
If we take Berthoff and Rosenblatt seriously, then “uninterrupted” cannot be our highest virtue. Time matters, but time alone does not name the work. Silence matters, but silence alone does not support the making. If meaning is made, then instruction has ethical obligations. It must surface the processes by which meaning gets built, monitored, revised, and sometimes rebuilt from scratch. It must give language to the reader’s interior labor. It must legitimate rereading, uncertainty, and slow coherence, not as failure, but as process.
This is where familiar comprehension practices become more than technique. Structured dialogue, predicting, questioning, clarifying, summarizing, turns comprehension into something readers do with intention and community. It makes the hidden work discussable. It offers a shared rhythm so that struggle does not have to masquerade as solitude.
That shift also changes motivation. When reading is framed as meaning-making, the reader gains a form of authorship. The question shifts from “Did you get it right?” to “What did you make of this, and how did you arrive there?” The second question carries respect. It assumes intelligence. It invites agency. It treats cognition as the point, not noise to be suppressed. It also widens what counts as legitimate routes into meaning. Comics, multilingual texts, audiobooks, annotation, these stop being mere accommodations and become principled pathways. They become evidence that reading has always been more than one channel, more than one pace, more than one kind of body sitting still.
I return to USSR now because we are again renegotiating what it means to read. The technologies have changed, but the instructional assumptions feel familiar. We continue to believe that access and time are sufficient, that meaning will emerge if the conditions look right. Yet reading has always involved invisible labor, interpretive, cognitive, affective, that resists easy measurement. Now we inhabit a moment when new tools begin to read alongside us, for us, and sometimes in our place. We are surrounded by systems that promise efficiency, fluency, even comprehension itself.
The risk is not that reading will disappear. The risk is that its labor will become even harder to see.
Only after we acknowledge meaning-making does AI become interesting. The question is not whether machines can process language. They can. The question is what happens to meaning when interpretation is displaced, assisted, or obscured. If a student uses AI to summarize, what kind of reading has occurred, and what kind has been deferred? If a faculty member uses AI to scan a literature review, what kind of attention has been gained, and what kind has been traded away? If institutional pressures reward speed, what kinds of readers will we declare competent, and which kinds will we render invisible again?
USSR returns to me not as nostalgia, but as rehearsal. It reminds me how easily we confuse stillness with understanding, access with equity, performance with learning. Today, reading is rarely solitary, silent, or uninterrupted. It is mediated, assisted, accelerated. As machines enter the act itself, the old problem sharpens rather than fades. We are again deciding which kinds of reading matter, and which kinds of effort we are willing to see.
If one is ten years old, placed in a library full of books, and told simply to read, what could go wrong? What could go wrong is that the work of meaning remains unsupported, unnamed, and unshared. What could go wrong is that we build a world where fluent surfaces count more than honest cognition. What could go right, if we choose it, is a more accurate account of reading as it has always been: an active, effortful, deeply human practice of making sense.