Putting persons back into education

Abstract

Both the language of performance management and the target-setting culture of our schools lead to a ‘depersonalisation’ of education—a failure to respect young learners as persons. They become a ‘means’ to some further non-educational ‘end’. John Macmurray challenged this depersonalisation in terms not only of its impoverished educational consequences but also of a fundamental philosophical error in giving primacy to persons as ‘thinkers’ rather than to them as ‘doers’. Not ‘I think, therefore I am’, but ‘I do, therefore I am’.

Keywords:

• primacy of person
• language of education
• means/ends
• logic of action
• community
• whole person
• the practical
• values
• moral agent
• depersonalisation

Notes

1. With gratitude to Sir William Taylor who found this account in the archives of the London Institute of Education.