I open a bank account, you pay your mortgage, he/she gets a credit card, we buy health insurance, you invest safely, they… enjoy a bailout. A critical analysis of financial education in Spain

Abstract

International organizations, banks and public entities are altogether trying to teach financial education in the schools. The response to the crisis is to educate the children to be the perfect financial subjects that will create the perfect financial system. This working paper will study, then, how financial education is conceived, taught and received within the Spanish society, where the interpretations of the crisis and the role of the financial system is far from closed. The paper will look at this issue within the frame of neoliberal governmentality and it will try to understand it with discursive lenses. Departing from this analysis, it will go to the spaces of greyness and to the complexity and heterogeneous reality of social practices, such as specific financial education programmes, from where resistance is indeed possible to emerge and multiply