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."