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So, it's come to this. Dickens' biographer asserts that today, children's attention spans are too short to enable them to assimilate such written matter. This alarms me and serves as one more example of how children aren't stretched intellectually and academically in the way they used to be.
I genuinely believe that television and computers have invaded, taken over and dumbed down what is now a literary wasteland insofar as the works of Dickens and other great writers are concerned.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16896661
I'd say that she's absolutely right.
As a child of say, ten or so, I'd read most of the better known Dickens books and a whole lot more besides, including a lot of the classics.
Nowadays, I have a ten year old daughter who reads quite a lot but wouldn't bother with Dickens or the more traditional stuff that I enjoyed simply because they don't appeal to her.
She does also enjoy using the computer and watching TV but I think that, as a parent, I'm one of the lucky ones insomuch as that's not all that she does.
I work as a teaching assistant at a lower school and because I have a good grasp of the English language, I'm delegated to carry out a lot of reading/guided reading and literacy tasks with the children.
Without going into detail, suffice to say that their abilities leave a great deal to be desired.
Quote: wouldn't bother with Dickens
neither would I. I did read an awful lot but some authors just never appealed. Television was very limited, computers, I think IBM said the world only needed about 4, but most children, if they couldn't find some trouble to get into, would have rather done nothing than read a book.
Nowadays I think they just have TV instead of nothing, and computers are a new way of getting into trouble.
I suppose I haven't thought that through, but I am fairly serious about it, and I would look fairly critically at any idea things have changed in the way described.
Quote: Dickens' biographer asserts that today, children's attention spans are too short to enable them to assimilate such written matter.
A bit of an over exaggeration to label a whole generation. My daughter reads far more than I ever did, on a wide variety of stuff including the so called classics, as do most of her peers. Is this just a case "it was different in our day, the youth of today ..." we often forget what we were like when we were say 14.
I thought short attention spans was a general accepted feature of children?
Sound more like kids just don't want to read Dickens rather than having the lack of attention to do so (I mean if they can watch all that telly without a break surely they've some attention span to talk of 
).
If parents let their children spend hours in front of the TV,PC or other gaming device then its the parents that are to blame when their children leave school unable to do the basic three R's and find that they are unemployable.
If you think that your childs school is letting them down do something about it such as join the parent teacher association or board of governors and challenge the head to make improvements.
Children learn by example be it bad or good
People always told me I had a short attention span but
Oh how on earth was that a penalty!!
Quote: children's attention spans are too short to enable them to assimilate such written matter.
Does he think adults are any different? I consider myself well read and highly literate and have read Dickens, Shakespeare and some of the usual Greek classsics (Odyssey, Iliad etc) but I really can't be bothered to read them because I feel I should.
I agree with Nick. We risk labelling a generation in a way that scholars have done since way before I was born. If something is written in a dense and archaic manner who stipulates that children have to sit down and work their way through it as a mark of their literacy and intelligence? Apparently after his lifetime Shakespeare was considered 'another playwright' for 300years until someone decided he was greater than his contemporaries.
In little over 20 years the computer has changed 500 years of reading tradition and it is no wonder that the 'older generations' feel perturbed by it. Until the internet, e-books etc childrens' reading was largely dictated by what adults thought was good for them but now that has changed. It has often been said that Harry Potter has been a fantastic boost for children's enthusiasm for reading - I don't think anyone pretends it is great literature (in Dickens/Shakespeare terms) but great storytelling it definitely is. As long as kids sit down and read I think they will find their own preferences and will choose what to take further.
Why would anyone read Dickens? He's on the telly almost every week.
We must remember that the world has changed profoundly since Dickens wrote.
They didn't have television, recorded music or even electric light to read by. Most people had never travelled more than a few miles from their birthplace, life was at a slower pace and there were fewer distractions. Working people often held the same job for a lifetime and those who "bettered themselves" would generally rise within the same firm.
There is now so much to experience that few will invest the time in reading long novels. Gratification must now be instant. How many have actually read the whole of "War and Peace"?
What gets to me about this is originally Dickens novels were released as bite sized pieces - installments in the papers - maybe the attention span of our Victorian forefathers wasn't as great as some academics would have us believe - and that was the few that could read and write at all!
I don't attach much importance to how many people read Dickens any more. How many of the older generations used to read Homer or Plato?
What is much more important is how many of the younger generations are properly literate and know how to free their imagination. Visual media, like computer games, are good for certain things but imagination needs the freedom to fill in how things look and smell. How many of us have read a book, then seen a film or TV programme about it and been disappointed with the way in which the characters had been depicted?
Youngsters should be encouraged to read what interests them, not what previous generations have deemed to be classics. I've read more than my fair share of 1000+ page books, but never made it to the end of a single Bronte novel, because it didn't grip me. How can we expect youngsters to read books to which they can't relate, written in a form of English which no longer exists.
Get them into reading and let it take them where it will, don't force them down a prescribed route.
Ian
Yes and now instead of sitting down with a good set of paints and canvas we just look through a small hole and press a button, hey presto the picture is made... 
*sarcasm* off...
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