It is argued in this paper that in a culture of "performativity" research into "education" is often avoided. It is observed in many research publications that attention is given to techniques of learning, teaching, management, social equity, identity formation, leadership and delivery of the curriculum, without a justification being offered as to why such instrumental approaches should be regarded as being "educational". Often research quite unproblematically adopts rational-economic justifications couched in terms of "efficiency" and "effectiveness". Such approaches are however identified as nihilistic and not educational (Blake "et al.", 2000). In his book "After Virtue" (1984), Alasdair MacIntyre argues that the language of morality is under a state of grave disorder. It is here argued that similarly the language of education is also under threat of becoming 'irrelevant' in a highly technocratic world. Pring (2000) describes the discourse of education as consisting of five concepts: learning; teaching; process; worthwhileness; and personhood. It is proposed here that these latter three in particular are too often being neglected in our research. This paper seeks to examine how these two concepts of "worthwhileness" and "personhood" are integral to education, and how researchers may usefully integrate these into their own research practices.