Media knowledge as moral knowledge

 

 

 

 

The analysis of the media underlines that it is firstly moral arguments - moral knowledge - which are the best transportable for the media. It is also clearly identifiable which aspects the media pick up out of press releases of parties and of research institutes: mostly they are arguments with some educating or enlightening components.

Understandably, the media are looking for topics which evoke public interest - and often they therefore present histories in a scandalous manner. For instance an article of the Zeit (23.08.2007) has the title: "Captured in the shelter". The notion of shelter was often used in our interviews as well as an argument against integration and for special education in special schools. Interviewees using this term wanted to strech the "hard reality" of regular schools, where pupils with special needs and handicaps would be bantered and excluded by their healthy schoolmates. Special need pupils should not be exposed to such cruelties and visit therefore a special need school as a form of a "shelter" - so the argumentation. Other experts countered that children in special need schools were not more or less excluding with their schoolmates as those of regular schools, and the argument of the "shelter" is just an euphemism protecting exclusion from regular schools. The cited article of the Zeit depicts this formulation of "shelter" and turns it into its own contrary: "Captured in the shelter". The article - as few other dealing with this issue - discusses with the report of the UN Commission on Human Rights by Vernor Munoz Villalobos, which attest Germany a "politics of segregation", where 85% of German pupils with special needs visit special need schools (Tageszeitung, 12.11.2008).

The article picks up themes out of scientific research as well and shows the connections between socially depraved backgrunds of the pupils and the likelihood of being transferred to a special need school. The article - among many others, with references to scientific investigations (Frankfurter Rundschau, 22.03.2007) summarises that special need school violate the Human Right of children for equal treatment. As mentioned above, beside the parents’ organisations it is the media who most often refer to scientific investigations - mostly pro integration (Süddeutsche Zeitung Landkreis Bad Tölz, 04.10.2002; Tageszeitung, 29.10.2008; Tageszeitung, 20.08.2008).

Beside national studies the most often reffered international investigation is Pisa which has internationally shown, that integration would not be disadvantageous for the regular school children, on the contrary, they can benefit from integration as well. An article means even that only the political shock of PISA made the amendment of the Education Law in Bavaria towards integration possible: "Just three years ago, a reform like this would have been impossible, only the Pisa study shook up the Education policy actors" (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 18.11.203). The amendment gave, thanks to Pisa, the legal background which was already practiced by willing and courageous teachers and school principals in many thousands of cases in Bavaria (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 18.11.2003).