Financial literacy education as a public pedagogy: Consumerizing economic insecurity, ethics and democracy

Abstract

Financial literacy education (FLE) is not a technical, apolitical response to offloaded financial risk and responsibility but a public pedagogy that supports a particular problematization of economic insecurity. Given this, FLE researchers are asked to reflect upon their research, expand the FLE discipline and contribute to critical FLE research. This chapter's first section analyses FLE as a public pedagogy, contrasting researchers' construction of economic insecurity as a consumer problem and an ethics limited to the provision of individual consumer solutions with a critical, civic approach that exposes the former's ethical-political limitations. The second section examines examples of a consumerist 'civic' FLE public pedagogy and argues that they promote a citizenship that consumerises political action. The third section outlines a critical approach to FLE and research to promote a better understanding of the political, constructed character of financial insecurity and assist citizens in creating with others effective and ethical collective solutions to its present inequitable distribution.