During the last decade, particularly since the first PISA-Survey in 2001, a new paradigm of empirical educational research gains increasing popularity and dominance in the German discourses on education. The proponents of that paradigm declare an exclusive orientation on empirical data and a strict abstinence from hermeneutic "speculations" and from normative reflections. My first claim would be that falling into the "myth of the given" (Sellars) those proponents are frequently transporting in their works unreflected interpretative schemes which are either direct borrows from political and media discourses, or at least are opportune to the latter. In my presentation I intend to elaborate and to justify that claim by discussing the way in which prominent authors of the recent empirical educational research in Germany make use of the category of educational justice. A number of those authors build up the so called "Counsel for Action in Education" ("Aktionsrat Bildung") which published in 2007 an "Annual Report on Educational Justice" (see Vereinigung der Bayerischen Wirtschaft 2007). In that work they spelled out educational justice as an economic imperative that consists in a distribution of educational recourses according to the talents and the cognitive abilities of the students; a distribution, which would provide a optimal capitalization of these talents and abilities. Furthermore, that economic imperative requires limitations of individual liberties. So for example, children should be obligated to realize their "natural capacities" and to work to remove the barriers for that realization. For instance since children from immigrant families are thought to be bearers of unrealized talents because of their language deficits, they and their families must be required to speak German only both in public and private contexts. There is no need to say that the mentioned authors do not take any notice of the current philosophic discussion on (educational) justice. My claim is that they are instead reproducing clichés that are eligible to justify far reaching state interventions in the ways of life of the members of a society and to legitimatize massive limitations of individual liberties. The final question I am going to deal with in my presentation is whether this connection between empiricism and ideology is a necessary, or just a contingent one.

Conceptual and Dicourse Analysis

see "Proposal Information", last 6 lines.