Most students fail to read complete novels at school after being presented with short extracts and worksheets to practice comprehension and sentence structure, it was claimed.
The National Union of Teachers said the decline was being fuelled by the widespread closure of school libraries to save money.
Next week, the union will use its annual conference in Liverpool to call for dedicated space in the timetable to be created to give children more opportunity to “read for pleasure”.
Alan Gibbons, the children’s author, who will address the meeting, said an over-reliance on short extracts risked undermining children’s grasp of classic works by Dickens and Shakespeare.
Speaking before the conference, he said: “Schools use extracts to spot the metaphor or the simile, instead of allowing children to read whole books.
“We have seen a real increase in the technical dismantling of literature with the specific aim of hitting targets and doing well in exams.”
He added: “One of my daughters came home to tell me she was doing Great Expectations as part of her GCSEs.
“It turned out that all they were doing was reading chapter one, when the character Magwitch first appears, and then skipping to chapter 39, when he reappears, to compare the two scenes.
“They also watched the David Lean film version which, despite being a very, very good film, doesn’t even have the same ending as the book.
“It was a completely ludicrous exercise. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not literature.”
Mr Gibbons, who wrote the bestselling Shadow of the Minotaur, told how one secondary school class he visited was asked to scan part of Macbeth for scenes that “fitted with the theme of ‘ambition’ because the teacher thought it was going to be in their exam”.
“There was no attempt to read the thing or understand it,” he said.
Research last year by Heinemann, the educational publisher, found half of schools admitted regularly failing to finish novels such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Treasure Island, The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark and Goodnight Mr Tom because “whole book teaching was not a priority in class”.
Mr Gibbons has already led a campaign of children’s authors to protest against Sats tests in primary schools.
He has also written to the Government ordering extracts of his books to be removed from worksheets, insisting that novels “should not be used to bludgeon kids with comprehension”.
In a debate next week, NUT activists will say that all children should be given a designated entitlement to read in the school timetable.
Pupils in England and Wales should also be given automatic exposure to a wider range of texts, they will claim, and the union will back a campaign against the closure of school and community libraries.
Kevin Courtney, NUT deputy general secretary, said the regime of Sats tests and league tables has had a “stultifying effect on reading in schools”.
“The emphasis has been on moving children away from reading books for pleasure and turning the whole practice of reading into a broken-down, atomised skill set,” he said.
--By Graeme Paton,Published: 10:00PM GMT 26 Mar 2010
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