[bwestergard]

The author of this ought to engage more with the existing complements to reading in educational systems. These have the advantage of motivating students and teachers through the development of interpersonal relationships. Here are a few examples from different cultures:

"During each tutorial session, students are expected to orally communicate, defend, analyse, and critique the ideas of others as well as their own in conversations with the tutor and fellow students."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutorial_system

"Dharma combat, called issatsu (一拶, いっさつ, literally "challenge"[1]) or shosan[2] in Japanese, is a term in some schools of Buddhism referring to an intense exchange between student and teacher, and sometimes between teachers, as an occasion for one or both to demonstrate his or her understanding of the Dharma[3] and Buddhist tenets. It is used by both students and teachers to test and sharpen their understanding.[4]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma_combat

"Chavrusa, also spelled chavruta or ḥavruta (Aramaic: חַבְרוּתָא, lit. "fellowship" or "group of fellows"; pl. חַבְרָוָותָא), is a traditional rabbinic approach to Talmudic study in which a small group of students (usually 2-5) analyze, discuss, and debate a shared text."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chavrusa

[kkfx]

There is a deep issue in this model: it works very well in a two-people relation, one teacher for one student. It does not scale. Books offer an easy scalable ways since the same text from a single writer can be printed in many copies, one per reader.

[bwestergard]

With the exception of the Oxford example, the tradition is to pair students with one another and have a teacher listen in periodically. This does scale fairly well.

[kkfx]

Hum, sound something similar to Montessori schooling but honestly while prized here and there so far I fail to see any real tangible effectiveness...

Sure, peer learning scale fairly well AND if one peer know can probably successfully transmit with a bit of supervision to spot and correct eventually transmitted mistakes and sure try teaching something is a nice way to self-test their own knowledge and so decide where to go from the current state to know more, but such models IMO are very slow and works only in very well crafted environments where nearly all peers have already a certain cultural background and a bit of habit. Something I do not see much present in the real current world.

Books just need printing capacity, logistic, reader interest witch are much more present on scale: printing books does not means a dedicated industry, printers and binders can works for various kind of papers product for much of the industrial processing. Logistic it's the same.

However analyzing the "network effect" of such models might be very interesting.