The call for education for all is nothing new and often connected to the notion of fostering equality of opportunity by educational reforms. In this presentation we want to explore in which way equality of opportunity and educational equality is used as pattern in discourses on formal early childhood education against the thematic backdrop of the education reform debates in Austria and Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. On the basis of empirical material we will show why and in what ways the notion of ‘educational equality’ was used during the preschool education reform discourses of the 1960s and 1970s, and which discursive strategies are associated with the use of this term.

The discourses we reviewed differ in several respects. While Julia Seyss-Inquart focusses on a political discourse and uses debates and laws at federal, provincial and municipal level in her review of Austrian education reform, Adrian Schmidtke primarily analyses the educational science discourses that influenced and commented on the 1960s and 1970s reform of preschool education. As a result, our analytic approach to examining the source documents also differ. While Seyss-Inquart analyses the available education policy papers for their educational science content, Schmidtke examines the available educational science papers with a view to their effect on educational policy. We are therefore less interested in enforcing comparability on two very different reform discourses, which appeared in two different institutional places. Instead, our main interest is to use the subject of educational equality to reconstruct the discursive formations, rules and principles that allow for a structurally similar - thematic and strategic – application of a single term in two very different contexts.

Hoffmann-Ocon, Andreas / Schmidtke, Adrian (2011): Zwischen Bildungspolitik und Bildungswissenschaft: Legitimationen von Bildungsreformen in bildungshistorischer Perspektive. In: Ludwig, Luise/ Luckas, Helga/ Hamburger, Franz/ Aufenanger, Stefan (Hrsg.): Bildung in der Demokratie II. Tendenzen - Diskurse - Praktiken. Opladen: Budrich, 107-121. Schmidtke, Adrian (2011): Internationale Bezüge im Vorschuldiskurs 1965 - 1976. In: Bilstein, Johannes / Ecarius, Jutta / Keiner, Edwin (Hrsg.): Kulturelle Differenzen und Globalisierung: Herausforderungen für Erziehung und Bildung. Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag, 175-195. Schmidtke, Adrian / Seyss-Inquart, Julia (2012): Bildungspolitik und Bildungsreform - Bildungsgerechtigkeit als Thema in österreichischen und deutschen Bildungsreformdiskursen. In: Fegter, Susann / Kessl, Fabian / Langer, Antje / Ott, Marion / Rothe, Daniela / Wrana, Daniel (Hrsg): Erziehungswissenschaftliche Diskursforschung. Empirische Analysen zu Bildungs- und Erziehungsverhältnissen. Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag (in preparation). Seyss-Inquart, Julia (2011): „Wenn ich groß bin werde ich Humankapital“ – Anmerkungen über die institutionelle Fremdbetreuung von Kindern. In: Forster, Edgar / Casale, Rita (Hrsg.): Jahrbuch Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung in der Erziehungswissenschaft, 131-142.