Financial education: A political project of financialisation? Education as a means to foster private financial interventions and logics

• In Event: Remapping State/Education Relations in the Context of North-South Epistemologies

Proposal

The dissemination of privately funded Financial Education (FE) material and programmes in German schools (especially by the banks) has been on the rise, especially since the financial crisis of 2008. In this paper I position FE as a political project of financialisation aimed at gathering broad public and private support as a micro-scale intervention corresponding to the logics of the financialisation of the everyday, or: the “rise of the citizen as investor” (van der Zwan, 2014, p. 111). This project is presented as intellectually intertwined with the rise of globalised, Anglo-American neoliberalism. As such, FE should follow the logics of both neoliberalism and financialisation resulting in an embedding of Anglo-American neoliberal values in Germany’s capitalist system and an overall harmonisation of capitalist logics. Yet scholars of Cultural Political Economy (CPE) argue there is a predominance of ordoliberal values in Germany’s neoliberal model rooted in different theoretical resources than its Anglo-American counterpart. Analysing the social imaginary conveyed in post-financial crisis FE school material especially with regards to the contradicting values conveyed by the representation of debt, Germany’s political economy continues to remain embedded within ordoliberal theory which in turn mediates the ideational basis of finance capital’s interventions.

Author

• Julia Erdelmann, University of Cambridge