Poetic school canon and literary pedagogy in baccalaureate. The invisible writers in the literature manuals

Abstract

For the first century and a half in the existence of the model of literary education based on history of literature, the school textbooks allotted to the different stages from primary education to baccalaureate have provided to the student body a minimum basis of the history, biographies and major works of Spanish literature. However, the detailed analysis of the textbooks demonstrates a remarkable shortage of female writers (mainly poets), creating a fake canon which does not correspond with the reality of the literary quality. Throughout the present article, we conduct an analysis of three different textbooks used in Baccalaureate in order to prove through its outcome that the absence of women in their pages is result of a biased and patriarchal interpretation of the literary pedagogical canon that, as a cultural product, is still being transmitted to new generations omitting the cultural and equality values that social pedagogy and objective literary criticism stand for