Excluding Women from the Educational Realm

Women have been traditionally underrepresented in the scholarship of the academic disciplines. Jane Roland Martin, continuing a line of thought she initiated in a recent article (HER, August 1981), examines the exclusion of women from philosophy of education both as subjects who have written about education and as objects of educational study and thought. She traces this exclusion from a misunderstanding of the writings of Plato, Rousseau, and Pestalozzi on the education of women, and builds a comprehensive critique of the concepts of education, liberal education, and teaching which are accepted by analytic philosophers of education. Martin proposes a possible reconstruction of the field of philosophy of education to include women, and describes the benefits of such a needed undertaking.