In some sense, the debate initiated by Kant [with regards to education] has continued ever since. Johann Friedrich Herbart's reformulation of the issue, outlining that philosophy should give us the aims, and psychology the means, to achieve them, reconceived the place of empirical facts, but left the over-all design almost untouched. It will become radicalized in the positivistic blend where a science of education is seen as only able to deal with the means in relation to achieving certain ends, not with the ends themselves. Such an empirical approach, which finds itself within the idea that we can control reality, is strikingly argued for by Wolfgang Brezinka in his Von der Padagogik zur Erziehungswissenschaft [From Educational Theory to the Science of Education] published in 1972. In this kind of positivism, educational science is defined as that approach in which one looks for general laws and thus tries to explain, predict, and use technology. Hypotheses are seen as only temporarily valid and are carried by intersubjective repeated observations. He accepts that it is not possible to discover "real" laws, that one has to content oneself with statistical regularities; but value judgments can never be scientific, as they involve, in his opinion, subjective decisions. His idea of education is well known: the educator exerts influence on the child with the aim for him to achieve certain mental dispositions. The main problem for an educational science is therefore to work out which conditions have to be fulfilled in order to reach particular aims. It is therefore a teleological, statistical (or casual), analytically-oriented science. Brezinka's idea about education is the paradigmatic way in which activities in the context of education and child-rearing are conceived. Indeed, teacher as well as parent often infer their successfulness from the effect of their investigations, and so does society in its preoccupation with output, performativity, and effectiveness, and thus do educational sciences in general as well.

Though the Kantian rationalist presuppositions would soon have to be given up, the development of the natural sciences, and of social sciences mimicking the methods of the natural sciences, will radicalize the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori on the one hand and between facts and values on the other. Among other reasons, this too contributed to the emergence of a wider crisis of rationality. The question of whether reason, and reason alone, can decide what should be done, and if, moreover, rational thinking is even possible at all, are at the heart of the matter. This can be made clear particularly with the use of two key ideas: performativity and nihilism. The quest for efficient solutions to problems is characteristic of modernity[...]. Under performativity, deliberation over ends is eclipsed and all kinds of business and activity are measured and ranked against each other, with ever less concern for the rationale for doing so. Thus performativity obscures differences, requiring everything to be commensurable with everything else, so that things can be ranked on the same scale and everyone can be "accountable" against the same standards. This in turn entails the devaluing, and perhaps the eradication, of what cannot be ranked[...]. Education nowadays is characterized by a [...] nihilism, by a lack of commitment which we conceal with the reduction of complex educational aims and purposes and with this a positive refusal to devote real thought to questions of the aims and purposes of education. The only sure value of education lies in the maintenance and extension of the system itself, in "efficiency" and "effectiveness," the service of government in the quest for "what works" [...].

-- from "The Origin: Education, Philosophy, and a Work of Art" by Paul Smeyer

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