The project of this paper is to investigate the possibility of a dialogue between the European cultures as far as education is concerned in order to improve thinking as much as decision making. A first attempt to achieve these aims through the plain translation of the major European national concepts in a common language - English, as a matter of fact- quickly reached its limits and showed its naivety. The urge to go back to cultural explanations and historical backgrounds for reconstructing concepts in their full comprehension may drive us back to dive deeply in the so-called irreducibility of national traditions and get drowned .... Between these two dead ends, could we find a way for achieving in the same movement a deepening and an unfolding of the educational cultures and offer real opportunities for comparative and cooperative thinking ?" " Laïcité ", this word does not exist in English. It's a pity it doesn't ! ". This I heard a few years ago from an english colleague, as we were trying to initiate a dictionary of European words in the educational field. She failed to translate the word but this was no obstacle to her deep understanding of its meaning and to her expressing some sort of regret not to be able to introduce the idea among national English concepts, were it possible to acclimatize it to a so different historical background.In the same time, albeit the commonly assumed irreducibility of national traditions, we are given lots of pedagogical handbooks drawing portraits of the greatest European pedagogues and their works with the illusion of a straight and easy understanding of their thought and of our being offered an open choice among the goods displayed on a free pedagogical common market..So, should we speak of transparency or opacity between the national educational theories ? I assume that we need some sort of rewriting of each tradition in order to build comparable objects and these are what I would call (with others) cultural educational paradigms. This would lead less to a comparison of dogmas or even concepts than to a confrontation of problems and their original solvings. Each culture could be revisited with the aim of listing its main educational problematics in order to emphasize their inner coherence and longevity ( under the name of ideology ? épistémè ?) and give the researcher a chance to foster intersections with foreign paradigms.We will try to investigate the logical conditions of elaborating such paradigms : what are they made of, embodied as they may be in institutions, philosophical theories, narratives, practices, laws, .... ? What do they allow to think, what do they prevent to do as far as educational specialists but also ordinary people are concerned ? How do they affect the story of individuals as educated and virtual educator?We would like to illustrate this attempt by sketching a project of dialogue between the German and French educational paradigms concerning a few items ( for instance : use of codes in education, importance given to culture or experience, major use of language or not, .. ) We will also recall the historical attraction exerted by both models on one another, the crossed readings of French authors by German theorists and of German ones by French pedagogues...