I listened to the radio with astonishment earlier this week as a teacher told a Today presenter that, contrary to what cynics like to think, children studying English in England and Wales do indeed have "whole books" on the syllabus.

She spoke as if there was something heroic about it, like finding a whale alongside your chips and mushy peas rather than a fillet of haddock.

The conversation had been prompted by Michael Gove's announcement that forthwith the 19th-century novel is to be returned to the GCSE curriculum. He makes it sound like an endangered species being released back into its natural habitat after a successful breeding programme. God help it, though, if it runs into readers wielding guns designed to shoot off florid paragraphs, dated references and unnecessary subplots.

(In passing, may I suggest the 19th-century Scottish novel also be enshrined on our English curriculum? That, though, is a digression worthy of that century's titan Sir Walter Scott, and one I don't have space to follow up as thoroughly as it deserves, though obvious names include John Galt, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Hogg and Arthur Conan Doyle.)

The idea of separating examinable scenes and chapters from "whole books", or telling teachers what passages their charges will be tested on, would be laughable if it did not suggest a cultural shift that seems to be gathering pace. This creeping advance is gaining ground with, if not general approval, remarkably little outcry. By telling coincidence, the Today segment came on the heels of a news story the previous day about a newly published app of Winnie the Pooh. The publisher has shortened and simplified the story because, as they commented, "Today's children's attention spans are slightly different to how they were in 1926". Or, as one observer put it, "Pooh is a bear of very little brain, but not as small as yours." However, if you want the mammoth version that has charmed young children for almost a century, you can purchase that in addition to the app, for an extra fee.

I am not a great admirer of Mr Gove's apparent addiction to Victorian methods and principles, but which reader of these pages would not envy any GCSE pupil asked to study what are inarguably among the finest novels ever written? Obviously, if from pre-school age these youngsters have been deemed unworthy of books of more than two syllables or pages, or of ideas so complicated they require animations of EH Shepard's magical illustrations rather than the tranquil beauty of his gentle drawings to be comprehensible, then it's no wonder that by 14 or 15 some might find the idea of a "whole" book daunting. It seems decidedly sinister to me, however, that at an age when a child is young enough to be introduced to AA Milne, their levels of concentration have already been eroded, or altered, to the point where classic material has to be reshaped to meet their needs.

Personally, I don't believe their minds are any different from ours. I know so many young children who disappear to bed with a book which they proceed to swallow as if it were chocolate-coated, emerging at breakfast with an imagination buzzing with new ideas. Their brains have not been socially engineered into accepting nothing bigger than a soundbite, and they would be grossly insulted if anyone suggested they had.

That is what I do admire about Mr Gove: his refusal to patronise pupils, or to prejudge and underrate their minds. I remember little about my secondary school days, but one moment stands out. When I picked a copy of Henry James off the library shelf, my English teacher told me that I was too young for him. What more incentive did I need? Off I went, determined to prove her wrong, and I am forever grateful that I did. I had never encountered prose like his, or sentences that ran on and on like musical scales, without pause for breath. I just wish she'd also declared Proust out of bounds so that I might have read him at the age when time is limitless, and no book too daunting to tackle.