Maxine Greene

Sarah Maxine Greene was an American philosopher of education who spent most of her career at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she held the William F. Russell professorship in the foundations of education from 1975 to 1998. Born in 1917, she became the second woman elected president of the Philosophy of Education Society in 1967 and the third woman to lead the American Educational Research Association in 1981. Her scholarship brought existential philosophy into educational theory and argued that engagement with the arts and literature could awaken students and teachers to greater social possibility, a stance she summarized in her idea of wide-awakeness. She founded the Maxine Greene Foundation for Social Imagination, the Arts, and Education and worked closely with the Lincoln Center Institute, writing six books and more than a hundred articles that remain widely read in philosophy of education.