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.
[5] 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.'"
"[6] 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.
"[5] 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).
"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!
"[5] 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.
"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.
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.
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.
"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.
[9] Predictably, Martin's challenges to patriarchal orthodoxies "sparked acrimonious controversy, especially among analytic philosophers of education," notes Laird.
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.
"[10] The Schoolhome: Rethinking School for Changing Families (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) "Re-interpreting Maria Montessori's 'casa dei bambini' and critiquing William James' 'Moral Equivalent of War' whileciting myriad sources from both popular and high culture, this book radically re-conceptualized school as a 'moral equivalent of home' for both 'learning to live' and learning about dominated and dominating cultures," writes Susan Laird, in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present.
"Faulting the epistemological fallacy that reduces curriculum to mere 'spectator' knowledge, it also deployed Aristotle's golden mean to re-theorize gender-sensitivity.
Moreover, it called for consciousness-raising about a miseducative phenomenon she named domephobia, a morbid fear and repressive hatred of things domestic that infects both culture and education in the United States to the detriment of women's and children's well-being.
Here, Martin theorizes in greater depth the notion of a “cultural wealth” curriculum, which she introduced in her 1995 DeGarmo Lecture (published as “There’s too much to teach: Cultural wealth in an age of scarcity,” Educational Researcher 25, 2, 1996, 4–10, 16) and elaborated in her 1996 John Dewey Lecture, “Cultural Miseducation: In Search of a Democratic Solution.” In a 2007 interview, Martin explained the "miseducation" of the book's title: "From a social policy perspective it is important to recognize that education can be harmful, so that we are motivated to take some kind of preventive action.
"I had been gathering the case studies I use in Educational Metamorphoses for almost 30 years and I decided to see if I could ... write these up," Martin recalled, in an interview.
This has partly to do, she asserts, with "a nature/culture divide," which conceives of the learner in Cartesian terms, as a rational, disembodied mind as opposed to an embodied being, and a "two-sphere split" that patrols the border between civic and domestic, public and personal.
... John Dewey, Francis W. Parker, and other members of the progressive movement wanted a sound education for as many children as possible, rejecting nineteenth-century methods of drill, tests, and memorization.
Little Red, located in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood in New York City known as an artists’ haven, had children of all economic classes."
In their late eighties at the time of the interviews, Martin's classmates "can still sing the songs they learned in elementary school and credit the progressive education they loved with shaping their outlooks and life trajectories," writes Howe.
Martin "frames these stories from the former students ... with philosophical commentary, bringing to light the underpinnings of the kind of progressive education employed at Little Red and commenting critically on the endeavor.
Waks characterizes Martin's work as "marked by a rare combination of analytical precision, philosophical imagination, social responsibility, and natural charm.
"[17] As a result, he notes, it "has deservedly reached a wide audience and has influenced the selection and treatment of many topics taken up by others for further study.” In 1962, after graduating from Radcliffe, Martin married Michael Lou Martin, a fellow graduate student who would go on to become a philosopher of science and professor in the Philosophy Department at Boston University (1965–1996).