Canonical Authors Studied in High School – Patriarchal and Anchronistic Gender Education?
Canonical Authors Studied in High School – Patriarchal and Anchronistic Gender Education?

Author(s): Nicoleta Foltea
Subject(s): Social Sciences
Published by: Editura Lumen, Asociatia Lumen
Keywords: Gender dimension; anachronistic and patriarchal perspective; novels; high school.
Summary/Abstract: The study of Romanian language and litareture aims at offering pupils a means of signifier framing articulation of the world, i.e. of being able to know, explain and internalize reality, to produce messages concerning all aspects of life, supposedly including gender dimension. The article indends to reveal how much and towards what gender education is oriented by means of the Romanian language and literature curricula, as well ashow much and in what way is that achieved by means of studying in high school the novels belonging to canonical authors, starting from the premise that - as the impact studies for compulsory education occasioned by the repeated reforms of the Romanian educational system in post-December Romania a patriarchal and anachronistic prospect - is continued. The existing studies don't aim for an analysis of the gender issue at the secondary level, which offers the frame for the present investigation. Thus, the content analysis of high school curricula and of the significant sequences form the novels belonging to the canonical authors, which is achieved by applying two non-standard coding schemes, confirms the hypothesis that, all along the literature sudy in high school there are conveyed contents conflicting with the social trends towards the "reflexive modernity" (Vlăsceanu, 2007). This analytic perspective of gender education through literary study reveals deficiency in curricula conceiving as well as in selecting the texts proposed for study by the textbooks authors.

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