This article presents "Learning to be Human", which John Macmurray delivered on 5 May 1958 as the annual public lecture at Moray House College of Education, now part of Edinburgh University. The key themes of the paper are ones to which Macmurray returned again and again in both his educational and his philosophical writing for over 40 years and they remain important for us today. Foremost amongst them is the necessity of grounding one's view of education in a view of what it means to be and become a human being. Unless we ask fundamental questions of this kind then the education system we develop, the schools we encourage, the teachers whose work we put at the heart of our expectations, and the families whose children we insist on daily attendance will persistently and pervasively fail to grasp what is important and will therefore fail themselves and the society to which they belong. For Macmurray the most important double fact about our human nature is, first, its mutuality: we can develop our humanity only within the context of our reciprocal care for each other. Secondly, what he calls "the paradox of human nature" is that whilst we are born human we also have to learn to become human. What flows from this? If the first principle of human nature is mutuality then "the first priority in education ... is learning to live in personal relation to other people [i.e.] learning to live in community." This is the first priority because "failure in this is fundamental failure which cannot be compensated for by success in other fields; because our ability to enter into fully personal relations with others is the measure of our humanity." In part this means distinguishing between education and erudition, valuing the former over the latter, understanding that teaching pupils is more important than teaching subjects and that the relationship between pupil and teacher is at the core of the education process.