Jane Roland Martin

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."

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."

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." 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. ... 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.

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."

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."

Changing the Educational Landscape: Philosophy, Women and Curriculum (New York: Routledge, 1994)

A highly influential anthology of Martin's articles, Changing the Educational Landscape includes her "paradigm-shifting critique of epistemological inequality in philosophy of education and its concept of the educated person as well as her conceptual analysis of hidden curriculum" (Laird, Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present).

Coming of Age in Academe: Rekindling Women's Hopes and Reforming the academy (New York: Routledge, 2000)

Coming of Age in Academe considers the ways in which "the second-class status of education itself as a profession and field of study reflects an 'education-gender system' in higher education," notes Susan Laird, in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present. "Comparing academic women to immigrants assimilated into the United States over the past two centuries, Martin critiques various academic practices that perpetuate the academy's estrangement from women's lived experience and especially from ghettoized 'women's' occupations, including teaching." Martin advocates "dismantling the education-gender system through 'actions great and small,' 'both strategic and outrageous,'" and exhorts "liberal-arts faculty 'to think across the disciplines and across college lines in order to make common cause with scholars on education, nursing, and social-work faculties.'"

Cultural Miseducation: Toward a Democratic Solution (New York: Teacher's College Press, 2002).

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. There is so much that is miseducative in the culture, even forgetting for the moment about bad schools, TV, the Internet, and computer games—these are educational agents that pass down cultural liabilities to children and people of all ages."

Reviewing the book for the professional journal Educational Theory, Clarence W. Joldersma highlights Martin's attention to "cultural transmission," which in her analysis plays a profound role in education. Yet the philosophy of education has historically diminished or dismissed it entirely, she argues. 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. As a result, she contends, the philosophy of education has a huge blind spot when it comes to forms of education, such as "cultural transmission," that take place outside schools.

School Was Our Life: Remembering Progressive Education (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2018).

In School Was Our Life, Martin relies on her recollections as well as those of her former classmates to retrospectively analyze their early, formative educational experiences, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, at Elisabeth Irwin's Little Red School House in New York City. "Little Red," as Martin and her interviewees fondly recall it, was a proving ground for progressive education in the United States and, as Sondra Wieland Howe notes in her review of the book for the Journal of Historical Research in Music Education, "iconic in that movement."

Elaborating on the movement, Howe writes, "The progressive education philosophy of Little Red was a reaction against the traditional schooling of New York City’s public schools. Irwin’s book of the 1920s, Fitting the School to the Child, refuted the idea that the child had to conform to the school; rather the school should be conforming to the child. ... 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. In a time when the role of the arts in education and public schooling itself are under attack in the United States, Martin makes a case for a different style of education designed for the defense of democracy and expresses hope that an education like hers can become an opportunity for all."

Recognition (Awards, Fellowships, Professional Honors)

In 1987, Martin received a Guggenheim Award for her work, in 2013 the John Dewey Society's Outstanding Achievement Award, and in 2016 a MacDowell Fellowship. At MacDowell, she worked "on an analytic educational memoir," according to her biography on the MacDowell website, "written from the dual standpoint of the schoolchild she was when she graduated from the 8th grade of The Little Red Schoolhouse in Greenwich Village in 1943 and the philosopher she became when she received her Ph.D. in 1961 from Harvard/Radcliffe." The resulting book, School Was Our Life: Remembering Progressive Education, was published by Indiana University Press in 2018.

In addition, Martin is the recipient of honorary doctorates from the University of Umeå in Umeå, Sweden (1995) and Salem State College, Salem, MA (1993). In 1991, she was the Society for Women in Philosophy's Distinguished Woman Philosopher honoree. From 1980 to 1981, she served as president of the Philosophy of Education Society.

Influence

D.G. Mulcahy, a professor of education, has published a book-length analysis of Martin's work, Knowledge, Gender, and Schooling: The Feminist Educational Thought of Jane Roland Martin (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 2002). In addition, he discusses Martin's theory of liberal education, comparing and contrasting it with those of Cardinal Newman and Mortimer Adler, in The Educated Person: Toward a New Paradigm for Liberal Education (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

"She has been a dominant figure in philosophy of education for almost half a century," observed Leonard J. Waks, himself a philosopher of education, in a 2007 issue of Education & Culture. "Most will associate [her] with the introduction of hotly contested issues related to the education of women, and of feminist themes and methods, into philosophy of education during the 1980s. Older readers, however, may still think of [Martin] as one of the pioneer analytical philosophers of education." 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.”

Personal life

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). Michael Martin died in 2015, at the age of 83, from complications related to Parkinson's disease. An obituary in the Integrated History and Philosophy of Science newsletter noted that his interests sometimes overlapped with his wife's: "His 1972 book, Concepts of Science Education: A Philosophical Analysis, was the first English-language book to address philosophical issues in science education." "Aerial Distance, Esotericism, and Other Closely Related Traps," Signs, 21 (1996), 584–614. "Methodological Essentialism, False Difference, and Other Dangerous Traps," Signs, 19 (1994), 630–657. "Science in a Different Style," American Philosophical Quarterly, 25 (1988), 129–140. "Becoming Educated: A Journey of Alienation or Integration?" Journal of Education, Fall 1985. "Excluding Women from the Educational Realm," Harvard Educational Review, 52 (1982), 133–148. "Two Dogmas of Curriculum," Synthese, 51 (1982), 5-20. "The Ideal of the Educated Person," Educational Theory, 32 (1981), 97–109. "Needed: A Paradigm for Liberal Education," in Philosophy and Education 1981 (Chicago: National Society for the Study of Education), ed. Jonas Soltis, Chapter III. "What Should We Do with a Hidden Curriculum When We Find One?," Curriculum Inquiry (1976), 135–151. "Basic Actions and Simple Actions," American Philosophical Quarterly (1971), 59–68. "The Disciplines and the Curriculum," Educational Philosophy and Theory (1969), 23–40. "Another Look at the Doctrine of Verstehen," British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (1969), 53–6. "On the Reduction of 'Knowing That' to 'Knowing How'," in Language and Concepts in Education (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1961), ed. B.O.Smith and R.H.Ennis. "On 'Knowing How' and 'Knowing That'," The Philosophical Review (1958), 379–387.

Interviews

Print interviews Zan Boag, "Why School Must Change," New Philosopher, June 20, 2016.

TV/video interviews "CSU professor Daniel Mulcahy speaks with Jane Roland Martin at Central Connecticut State University."

Podcast interviews Eric Thomas Weber and Anthony Cashio, "School Was Our Life," Philosophy Breaks Bread, episode 88, December 5, 2019.