Making economic citizens beyond neoliberalism: Historical trajectories of a banker association’s efforts in economic education

Abstract

This paper explores the rationales of citizenship that underlie the development of economic education. To achieve this, it analyses the activities of a globally active private interest group, the International Thrift Institute (ITI), focusing on three selected historical periods characterized by crises and change. The analysis shows that the education of economic citizens is a history of juxtapositions of underlying conflicts wrapped in a constant need for consensus to stabilize changing political systems. During crises, the ITI championed different, and conflicting, rationales of economic citizenship. These range from the idea of economic education as an experience-based activity that strengthens individuals’ emotional reflexes in dealing with money, thereby promoting social cohesion, to the idea of economic education as a transformative intervention that creates economic citizens as customers of institutionalized saving services. The paper argues that economic education, given its normative goals, should not be reduced by private interest groups to legitimise and stabilise their agenda. Education for economic citizenship must remain controversial to raise questions about the economy. These are issues that cannot be addressed through individual consumer behaviour, but rather through political action. Economic citizens need to recognise political agency, collective deliberation and structural conditions.