A recent survey of teenage reading habits has suggested that young people are opting for easier reads, rather than "more challenging classics." Should we be concerned, or simply pleased that teenagers are reading at all?

There have probably been literary snobs for as long as there has been literature. Chaucer was no doubt denigrated for writing his crude poems in vernacular English rather than sticking to highbrow Latin; I suspect even the first scrapings in Coptic were denounced by some as dumbing down compared to the ideographic writings which went before. In more recent times, these attitudes have crystalised, upholding a selection of books to be venerated as classics, only occasionally allowing a new work to join the elite.

You might argue that books become classics because they stand the test of time, that they have some merit which keeps them relevant, but this would be fallacious. Older classics are regarded as classic simply because they were successful in their day or are all that survives of their era; more recent classics often gain their status because they were as unpopular and impenetrable when they were published as they seem now. What little value judgement is being made is generally based on pretension rather than insight.

But that's not to say classics should be disregarded, simply considered in their context. Consider two pre-twentieth century authors, Dickens and Scott. Both were hugely popular in their day, their works making their authors wealthy icons of their society, but they were successful for very different reasons. Dickens' books were, for the most part, deeply personal tales of the socially divided country he saw around him. Grinding poverty, injustice and death stalk his literary landscape like the ghost of London present. In many authors' hands these would have emerged as dank, depressing stories - like a nineteenth century Cathy Come Home. Dickens, however, was not a man given to dwell on the gloom. Instead, his books are shot through with passion and humour: larger than life Bumbles and Cheerybles, comic Fagins, charming Nancies and deeply satirical Circumlocution departments. His writing is filled not with despair but with joy. His heroes live in the hope that something will turn up. And frequently it does: villains meet with sticky ends; heroes win through - literary justice succeeds where the judiciary would fail. The optimism and the easy style made Dickens hugely popular. This, in turn, promoted the social issues which Dickens highlighted. Though many of the issues are no longer relevant to our age, Dickens' humanity ensures his books live on.

Scott, meanwhile, had an easier task. Rather than taking the grim slums of Scotland and producing a Rab C Nesbitt for the industrial age, he reached back into his nation's history, taking escapist tales of adventure and daring and packaging them for an audience who didn't want to reflect on the sorry state of the world around them. His heroes take the names and some of the actions of historical characters, but strip them of any moral ambiguity; his worlds are painted romantically rather than realistically.

It's an easy recipe for success. As with Harry Potter in our own era, escapism sells. As long as they aren't terribly written, such works succeed based on their novelty or the popularity of their subject matter. And to an industrial nation, tales of high adventure were both novel and popular. This meant that Scott didn't need to be as good a writer as Dickens, just not terrible. In comparison to the former's elegant and inventive prose, Scott's is functional, ironically coming across more like journalistic reportage than that of the former journalist. As a result, Scott's books have a far lower profile now than in his day, although the history he ransacked remains popular in films such as Rob Roy and Braveheart.

Why the comparison? Well, it matters because of the use of the phrase "more challenging classics." To what kind of challenge are these self-imposed guardians of literary quality referring? The challenge of extended vocabulary? Of contextual understanding? Of reading alternatives to received wisdom? Or simply of not putting down a bad book?

It is true that building vocabulary and understanding is a key point of reading for the young. It is equally true that many classics contain a broader vocabulary and intellectual foundation than, say, "Now We Are Ten." The trouble is that broader isn't necessarily better. After all, why would a classic have a more useful vocabulary than a contemporary adult book? The only way in which a classic would have more challenging vocabulary than, say, "A Brief History of Time" would be in terms of redundant terminology which has lapsed from the language. For anyone not pursuing a career in literature or history, there seems little advantage in this. And it's the same with the intellectual content: it may well be the case that reading Victor Hugo requires the reader to understand the relevance of tumbrils to Revolutionary France, it's less clear why this acquisition of knowledge is necessarily significant to the development of a modern teenager.

When it comes to being challenged in terms of viewpoint, modern society does much to prevent a reader going against the grain. Here the guardians of literary quality will run up against the guardians of moral values, frowning on Galton's eugenics or Ayn Rand's capitalism and banning Hitler's anti-Semitism. Anything old enough to be a classic in this vein is likely either to have become received wisdom, proscribed fallacy or even irrelevance. The idea that a modern reader would gain more by reading the arguments round the Corn Laws than more modern issues like gun control seems naive to say the least.

Which leaves bad books and our comparison between Dickens and Scott. To give merit to a reader for having the sheer bloody-mindedness to plough through the more turgid and self-indulgent works of pre-modern fiction and stick at it seems to have little or nothing to do with literacy or the development of an enquiring mind, which is presumably the reason we want to encourage our teenagers to read.

So, does all this mean I think there's not a problem? Not at all. Clearly, if our literacy rates are falling there is some kind of issue, but without more detailed statistics we can only guess at its nature or extent.

Here's a theory: I would suggest that with the advent of the Internet, mobile phones and other modern distractions, fewer young people are inclined to read books. Our surveys therefore are likely to reflect this, so if we were to factor out the young people who read infrequently what would that do to the literacy rate? Logically it would have to raise it, but it's far from clear whether the overall rate would then still show a decline in historic terms.

Then there's the question of how readers were surveyed. Were they asked about how often they read or simply what was the last book they read? If it was the last book a young person read, is it not possible that it demonstrated not that teenagers were reading below their mental age, but that they hadn't read for some time? If a child received a Noddy book for one birthday and an iPhone for the next, it might be that the Noddy book was the last thing they ever read.

There have, of course, always been distractions that keep some children from books. Whether it's been footballs, BMX bikes, games consoles or mobile phones, every generation has had a bugaboo that has caused despairing elders to decry the decline of civilization. What's different now is that the latest distractions are at least vaguely language-based. Whilst being out on a bike for all daylight hours hardly advances a child's reading age, reading sloppily-written Twitter feeds or the mangled English of an SMS is quite likely to retard it. Poor language and syntax becomes endemic, preventing children learning the constructs of language by example. At the same time, the banal content of these electronic sound-bites constrains the ability to express more complex ideas. Schools have always taught English in a rather erratic manner, biasing toward literary appreciation or language more at the whim of the teacher than through any kind of system. This means that there is little guidance as to what constitutes good language or grammar and those exposed to more electronic writing are bound to find themselves at some disadvantage. It's not exactly that their literary age is lower - I suspect few babies have LOL as their first "words" - but that it is built on the wrong foundations.

So what is to be done? The literary snobs would no doubt suggest that the banning of mobile phones or Twitter would provide the appropriate redress. I disagree. There's nothing wrong with children having their own "speak" as long as they realise that is exactly what it is. Teenagers of my generation managed to separate the hip-hop inspired language of the playground from the drier English of essays, so there's no reason why modern children couldn't do the same. The key is that they are exposed to enough well-written English that they can recognise it. This means that children need to be encouraged to find the time to read, which is partially about not drowning them in homework which serves no purpose other than to rob them of time, but mostly about getting them to enjoy reading. And the way you do that is to point them to books chosen not because the book police think they further some social end, but because they're engaging. The Harry Potter phenomenon proved that children don't just see books as a form of environmental vandalism committed by old people, so it's not an impossibility.

Which brings us back to our classics. If you're trying to encourage a life-long love of books in a young person, the principal selection criterion cannot be the alleged laudability of the work. Yes, Tolstoy may have much to tell us about Imperial Russia, but to a teenager struggling with his prose it seems more like time spent in Stalin's gulags. I remember a very good English teacher when I was at school: he introduced us to H G Wells and Edgar Allen Poe - works which excited teenage boys in their own day and still have that power now. The language was penetrable and relevant (apart from the odd puerile chuckle at the use of ejaculate for exclaim), the stories were exciting and as a result we were a well-read class, happy to bury ourselves in books during library lessons. To encourage children to read, they must pass the test of being enjoyable before assessing other merits. By all means have a discussion about the religious imagery in CS Lewis, but leave the challenging works on the shelf. If a child decides they want to read them, they'll still be there when they get older.