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 edu-cation, 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, biog-raphies and major works of Spanish literature. However, the detailed analysis of the text-books 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 Baccalau-reate 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 ideological product, is still being transmitted to new generations omitting the cul-tural and equality values that social pedagogy and objective literary criticism stand for.