Our hermeneutical prejudice against the problems of disciplinary identity and methodological autonomy inherent in the traditional educational studies functions as a conceptual criterion for a critical empirical analysis of the research themes and interests of the Korean educational scholars. A meticulous empirical investigation into the research topics contained in the titles of the 530 papers in the contemporary Korean Journal of Educational Research confirms our initial prejudice to the extend that the explicit linguistic renderings on the titles of the published papers are replete with either commonsensical, mundane terms and vocabularies or hackneyed jargons from the other independent disciplines and sciences. One of the conspicuous phenomena was a reiteration of such trite expressions as ``education``, ``school``, ``learning``, ``curriculum`` and their respective family-resemblance terms, as anticipated. In conjunction with the empirical findings we were able to identify a number of related issues for further in-depth studies: first, we are supposed to grapple with the issue of how to deal with the decontextualized signifier-signified relation in the contemporary educational theories and discourses; second, we face the issue of how to restore disciplinary rigor and identity without inveterate recourse to the methodology of mother/father disciplines; finally, we are obliged to discern bad metaphors(e.g., metaphoric abuse and misuse) from goods ones, which are implicit in the process of education theorizing.