Over the past 200 years, early childhood provision in Germany has primarily been oriented towards the goal of work-care reconciliation. Even though there is a long tradition in Germany of education-oriented approaches, the primary goal has always been care. The extensive development of early childhood centres for children under three years of age over the past 10 years is likewise driven by the goal of reconciling career and family life. However, the issue of improving young children's education has also become more important. This is clear from the German federal states' education plans, which are a curricular guideline for the form and content of work in early childhood centres. The education plans show, however, that there is a lack of clarity in terms of how education is understood. Two different understandings of education are implicitly competing with one another: the school-based, normative and the social constructivist understanding. This contribution illustrates this dichotomy by means of the key pedagogical processes of observation and documentation. A subsequent empirical analysis of learning stories from Germany confirms that there is an unclear and contradictory understanding of education in pedagogical practice too.