Abstract
Literature encloses the deepest soul of a community. Nevertheless, despite being present in all curricula for more than a century, it is not valued by students, who consider it a boring and unhelpful subject. This opinion has quite a social echo nowadays, when subjects are valued mainly based on their practicality for a future job. Through the analysis of several educational plans, developed in the 19th and 20th centuries in Spain and some neighbouring countries (France, Portugal and the United Kingdom), we suggest that one of the main causes of this fact is the historicist criterion. Faced with this, we propose that literature should be studied in a radically different way, adapting to the cognitive and linguistic level of the students, as well as their reading interests. In addition, we also propose that literature should be studied by relating it directly to the family and social references of the students, as representative of the desires, dreams and yearnings of each generation. As a result, ancient literary works must be avoided in the early years. In order to achieve this goal, the new methodology has to avoid the historicist criterion and focus on the creation of reading habits by teaching literature that is directly related to contemporaneity and the world students of the 21st century live in.
Keywords
Didactics; Historicism; Literature; Methodology; Reading