The paper focuses on principles for the design of school activities involving the collective reading of multiple texts. We show that the collective reading of multiple texts has been practiced in rare occasions in Western history. Scrutiny of the reasons for the persistence and the decline of this practice in different societies suggests that it may have powerful implications on our society and that we should be aware both of the opportunities it opens and of the dangers it hides. We articulate the theoretical tenets for an appropriate design of the collective reading of multiple texts. We then describe a new experimental study based on collective reading of multiple texts, and show how this reading impinged on further argumentative activities.