As we head towards the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens, acclaimed biographer Claire Tomalin makes the claims below:
"The only caveat I would make is that today’s children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.
"Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel and I think that’s a pity."
This caught my eye because my son who is a high school freshman just completed an intensive reading of A Tale of Two Cities in his English class. Even better, the kids voted on what book to read and they chose Dickens!
For me, it’s all about allowing children to read what they want to read when they are young, and then they will be ready for Dickens. But it’s that reading piece that is vital, whether it’s great literature or not.
Waking Brain Cells 
Wow — how condescending. We read Dickens in high school and it wasn’t that long ago. Ok, it was 15 years ago, but people were making the same complaints about my generation at that time. I think kids today are smarter than ever. Not every teen in the class might appreciate an author like Dickens — but when was the magical time when that was true?
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