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". (Contains 1 note.)