Jane Roland Martin (born July 20, 1929) is an American philosopher known for her work on philosophy of education—specifically, her consideration of gender-related issues in education, on which she has written extensively. Martin is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
In her entry on Martin for Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present, Susan Laird writes, "Martin is an internationally renowned philosopher whose inquiry in and about education has shaken its conceptual foundations, showing them to be deeply and consequentially gendered. For she has theorized a hidden curriculum of gender embedded in the ideal of the educated person and in basic concepts of teaching, schooling and education itself, often assumed to be gender-blind. As remedies, she has proposed a new gender-sensitive educational ideal, re-conceptualized schooling, urged activism for academic transformation, and recommended public acknowledgement of multiple educational agency, with a view to preservation of a broadly conceived cultural wealth."Susan Laird. "Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education"
Writing in Philosophy Now, Judith Suissa cited Martin as one of a vanguard of "contemporary feminist philosophers of education" who "have addressed the way the predominant ideal of the educated person, for hundreds of years, excluded traits, functions, and values traditionally associated with women."Judith Suissa. The Politics of Education. Philosophy Now. Published: 2007.
Gloria Steinem writes, in her foreword to Martin's Coming of Age in Academe, "Jane Roland Martin brings us together to think about the energy being wasted on an old game, and the possibilities if those energies were set free."
Early life
Martin was born in 1929, in New York City. "My mother was a school teacher (homemaking) at the Elizabeth Barrett Browning Jr. High School in the Bronx," she recalled in a 2007 interview. Her mother "had a lot of teacher friends," she said, "and often complained about '110 Livingston Street' (the address of the New York Board of Education) and the corruption and meanness of the 'system.'" Martin's father was a reporter for the Journal American.
Martin attended the Little Red Schoolhouse in New York City's Greenwich Village, "then a patchworked neighborhood made of working-class homes," notes Randall Everett Allsup in his review of Martin's philosophical memoir, School Was Our Life. Founded on Deweyite principles by the education reformer Elisabeth Irwin, the Schoolhouse was an independent progressive school. "In the early twentieth century, 'Little Red' was one of several grand experiments in universal public schooling–like the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, Carmelita Hinton’s Putney School in Vermont, or the Marietta Johnson Organic School of Education in Fairhope, Alabama–all aimed at democratizing education and teaching for citizenship," writes Allsup. Such schools embraced the cornerstone assumptions of Dewey's “New Education” movement, emphasizing "free activity" over "external discipline" and "learning through experience" over "learning from texts and teachers."
Martin's years at the school had a profound impact on her as a student and, ultimately, philosopher of education and feminist critic of the gendered assumptions (and outright sexism) permeating conventional approaches in the field. "They wanted it to be a model for public schools, with low tuition, large classes, a wide range of students, and an anti-racist curriculum," she told an interviewer. "It was heaven! ... It was a very formative experience for me and everyone else who went there." The Schoolhouse gave her a front-row seat to the early days of the progressive education movement, "later defined as constructivist, whole-child, or student-centered teaching/learning" (Allsup). Some of the movement's foundational assumptions would shape her philosophy of education.
Education
Martin took her AB degree at Radcliffe College in 1951. She went on to complete her master's degree in education at Harvard University in 1956 and in 1961 her Doctor of Philosophy degree at Radcliffe.
While at Harvard, she took a course in analytic philosophy taught by Israel Scheffler; it inspired her passion for philosophy, especially the application of analytic philosophy to education. "After college, I taught first at a private, then at a public school, for a total of three years," she recalled, in an interview with Leonard J. Waks. "While teaching, I enrolled for a master’s degree at the Harvard School of Education ... [W]hen I had one course left to go, a good friend told me to take a course with Israel Scheffler, because 'analytic philosophy is the key to everything!'"
The class was life-changing, inspiring her to pursue a doctorate in the subject. "At the time, I was teaching fifth grade and I was totally disillusioned with the school situation," she told Waks.
My complaint was the curriculum, the “lock step” public school curriculum. I wasn’t allowed to teach the smarter kids more. I would go home and try to revise the curriculum but I realized that I needed to know more in order to do so in any meaningful way. But before I knew it, I had been sufficiently transformed into an analytical philosopher that I couldn’t even remember that I had ever wanted to reform the curriculum. My “new self” only wanted to understand the logic of historical explanation! At about that time, Scheffler’s The Language of Education came out. And there it was: A teaches B to C. I had “found” myself.
Career
Martin joined the philosophy department at the University of Massachusetts Boston in 1972. Though she regarded herself as a feminist, "philosophy of education and feminism remained two separate, parallel worlds for me," she later observed. "I was a feminist and a philosopher, but not a feminist philosopher. Then, "one semester in the late 1970s," she was scheduled to teach a course on the philosophy of history but it was undersubscribed. "And so I said, 'Okay, I’ll teach the philosophy and feminism course.' And I never looked back." She spent her academic life at UMass Boston with the exception of 1996–1997, when she was a visiting professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. She retired in 1992.
Overview of Scholarly Work
Explaining, Understanding, & Teaching (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970)
Steeped in analytic philosophy's attention to linguistic issues, Explaining, Understanding, & Teaching is, as Martin notes in her introduction, an "essay in the philosophy of education" that grew out of her doctoral dissertation. The book "constitutes an inquiry into explaining something to someone and the understanding at which that explaining aims," Martin writes, "and also into the various roles in which explaining and understanding play in education in general and teaching in particular."
Readings in the Philosophy of Education: A Study of Curriculum, ed. Jane R. Martin (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1970).
"As the civil rights, peace, and women's movements captured the attention of US campuses and as the free school movement flourished in the 1970s, Martin's inquiry began to focus on the logic of curriculum," Susan Laird observes, in her entry on Martin in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: Piaget to the Present. "What should be the relationship between the disciplines and curriculum? What justifies a 'god-given subject' or 'immutable basic'? What is the anatomy of a proper school subject? What part should student choice play in curriculum, and should it be left to chance? What is 'hidden curriculum'?"
As Laird goes on to note, Martin's analysis led, inevitably, to a pointed critique of the "dogmatic assumptions undergirding the ideal of a liberal education and its most conservative advocates' objections to interdisciplinary fields such as social studies, Black studies, and women's studies." In the '70's, she turned her attention to "'the real-life problems of education' philosophically," writes Laird. "In so doing, she showed that philosophical inquiry on curriculum need not be epistemological, as [was] often then assumed, for significant ethical, social, and political curriculum questions frequently arise as well."
Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
Martin has been outspoken about the sexism that, during her early years in academe, barred the door to the inner sanctums of philosophy, then as now very much a boys' club. "So long as I could 'pass' as an analytical philosopher, I was 'one of the boys,'" she told an interviewer. "But I wasn’t really one of the boys. The fact that I was a woman made it a whole different ball game. ... [A]nalytical philosophy of education, like philosophy itself, was a male culture. Almost all the individuals were men. The men invited one another to their campuses to give seminars and lectures, but they never invited me. I wondered why not and whether there was something wrong with me. And the work itself, the subject matter discussed, was gendered... There were many topics you just didn’t talk about, like those related to domestic life," dismissed by male academics as only of interest to women and therefore mundane or trivial by definition.
Martin's trailblazing research on women and education, begun in 1980, upended such sexist assumptions and had a profound influence on philosophy of education. "Challenging philosophers and educators to take women's educational experiences and contributions seriously and to question their own longstanding assumptions about gender, she challenged them also to rethink the meaning of education itself, as well as their analytic approach," Susan Laird asserts, in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education. "Her boldly activist presidency of the Philosophy of Education Society marked a major turning point in the field's history in 1981. Martin first presented her new research on women with her frequently cited and republished presidential address, 'The Ideal of the Educated Person,' which critiqued analytic philosopher R.S. Peters' allegedly gender-neutral account of this ideal...".
Predictably, Martin's challenges to patriarchal orthodoxies "sparked acrimonious controversy, especially among analytic philosophers of education," notes Laird. In Reclaiming a Conversation, Martin responded to her critics. According to Laird, "Her first research on women had identified an epistemological inequality in contemporary analytic philosophy of education that excluded, distorted, and devalued women as subjects and objects of educational thought. She had documented contemporary analytic philosophers' neglect even of classics (by both men and women) from the history of thought about women's educational activities. Furthermore, Martin had shown that such neglect was consequential, insofar as it led contemporary philosophers of education not only to exclude women, but also to rule questions about child-rearing out of bounds to the field."
"Aiming to correct epistemological inequality then evident in analytic philosophy of education," Reclaiming a Conversation was "paradigm-shifting for the field," says Laird, who calls it "the first major late-modern study of educational thought whose subjects and objects included women."
The Schoolhome: Rethinking School for Changing Families (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992)