ABSTRACT
The depersonalisation of educational discourse and practice, introduced in the previous chapter, is continued here but with special reference to the work of John Macmurray (philosopher in the 1930s) and his development of ‘the form of the personal’ within his popular Gifford Lectures. It is important not only philosophically but also morally to distinguish between someone as ‘object’, explicable in purely material terms (manifested in so much educational policy and practice), and someone as ‘person’ - referred to by the philosopher Peter Strawson as the ‘logical primitiveness of the concept of a person’ – its indispensability in our account of the world, not reducible to the concept of a physical object. For Macmurray the distinctive features of ‘the form of the personal’ include the development of moral agency, the fruitfulness of life within community and the autonomy arising from being able to think for oneself.
