Reading in general is good. I loved Les Miserables, To Kill A Mockingbird, 1984. I just think that there are just some so-called "classics" that are no longer relevant, at least not to high-school students. What is the point of having a teenager read Great Expectations? Yes, it mocks Victorian society, but in case you haven't noticed, Victorian society kinda died out a century or so ago. Without that, all you have is a stuffy and boring book about some crazy hermit and a criminal. The difficulty in having a kid read something like Dickens is not worth whatever application the books may have to real life.