EDUCATIONAL FUTURES

RETHINKING THEORY AND PRACTICE

Volume 53

Series Editors
Michael A. Peters
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Editorial Board

Michael Apple, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Miriam David, Institute of Education, London University, UK
Cushla Kapitzke, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Simon Marginson, University of Melbourne, Australia
Mark Olssen, University of Surrey, UK
Fazal Rizvi, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Susan Robertson, University of Bristol, UK
Tripathi, Dresden University of Technology,
Arun Tripathi
Germany National Institute of Science, Technology &
Development Studies, New Delhi, India
Linda Tuahwai Smith, University of Waikato, New Zealand

Scope
This series maps the emergent field of educational futures. It will commission
books on the futures of education in relation to the question of globalisation and
knowledge economy. It seeks authors who can demonstrate their understanding
of discourses of the knowledge and learning economies. It aspires to build a
consistent approach to educational futures in terms of traditional methods,
including scenario planning and foresight, as well as imaginative narratives, and it
will examine examples of futures research in education, pedagogical experiments,
new utopian thinking, and educational policy futures with a strong accent on actual
policies and examples.
Financial Literacy Education
Neoliberalism, the Consumer and the Citizen

By
Chris Arthur

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction: The Neoliberal Response to the Economic Crisis ix

Chapter 1: Financial Literacy Education 1

Chapter 2: Capitalist Crises, Hyperreal Finance and Creative Destruction 13

Chapter 3: The Origins of Consumer Financial Literacy Education

Liberal and Neoliberal Subjectivity 31

Chapter 4: The Origins of Consumer Financial Literacy Education

Neoclassical Economics and Consumer Education 53

Chapter 5: Sign Value and the Production of Financial Literacy Education 75

Chapter 6: Financial Literacy, Discipline, Biopower and Governmentality 89

Chapter 7: Critical Financial Literacy Education 107

Conclusion: Overcoming Obstacles 121

References 125

Index 137

v
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to those who have assisted me in researching and writing this

book.
I especially want to thank my thesis supervisor, Trevor Norris, for his
support and encouragement during my time at OISE/UT. As a thesis supervisor
Trevor greatly helped me to clarify my thinking on the topic of financial
literacy through his critical and encouraging comments and questions. As a
student at OISE/UT, I had the privilege of having him as a professor for a
number of my courses and always found his classes engaging and academically
rigorous. In his classes I always greatly appreciated his critical questions and
the way in which he created a classroom space in which students felt
comfortable actively participating in philosophical discussion. As a teacher I
was always impressed with how his style of teaching moved beyond the false
polarity of authoritarianism and laissez-faire. His continued support of my
research is greatly appreciated and it is no exaggeration to write that without
Trevor this book would not have been possible.
In addition, there were many other faculty at OISE/UT that were formative
to my intellectual growth and I wish to thank them. First, Diane Farmer who
introduced me to and helped me better understand Pierre Bourdieu’s thought,
which marks much of this book. Next, John Portelli who sparked my interest in
philosophical research and critical pedagogy and taught me to continually
question assumptions and ‘unpack’ concepts too often brushed over, and lastly,
Laura Pinto who offered insightful critical comments on earlier drafts of this
book.
I also want to thank Karen Arthur, my mom. She is both an inspiration for
my continued study and an invaluable critical reviewer of my work. She has
read countless drafts and discussed numerous aspects of this work with me
over the years it took to complete this project; the form and arguments of this
book bear the imprint of many of her critical comments, suggestions and
questions. Thanks so much for all your help, encouragement and patience over
the years.
Finally, I offer my unequivocal appreciation and thanks to Peter de Liefde
from Sense Publishing and Michael A. Peters for their support of this project
and Bernice Kelly for all her hard work and valuable assistance.

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 INTRODUCTION

The Neoliberal Response to the Economic Crisis

The Great Recession sparked by the implosion of the United States’ housing
bubble in 2007 is far from over. According to Slavoj Zizek (2010) we have
entered a new era of “permanent economic emergency” in which growth is
expected to be weak and hard sacrifices will have to be made. Politicians
and economists lament the effects of austerity but argue that cuts to social
spending are needed to avert economic catastrophe, restore investor
confidence and create jobs. These ‘necessary’ cuts have taken a variety of
superficially diverse forms but have in common the aim of shifting the
effects of devaluation to the working class1: in the United States, the Hawaiian
government reduced the school week to four days for a year; in other states
street lights have been turned off (Cooper, 2010, Aug. 6); pavement, because
of its maintenance costs, has been broken up (Etter, 2010, July 17); and “the
state of California has cut health insurance for nine hundred thousand poor
children” (McNally, 2011, p. 4). In Britain, the government has slashed
funding for higher education and in the near future plans to cut 700,000 public
sector jobs (Werdigier, 2011, Dec. 8; Yalnizyan, 2010, Nov. 12). In Canada,
the Ontario provincial government has reduced “food assistance for the
disabled (while keeping corporate tax cuts in place) [and] imposed a two-year
wage freeze on 350,000 non-unionized government workers” (Panitch &
Gindin, 2010, July 20, para. 7). With the spread of financial contagion to
continental Europe, European workers are told that they alone must bear the
burden of paying down their governments’ debt and acquiesce to low wages,
high unemployment and fewer public services.
Obscuring the fact that austerity is a form of class warfare, politicians and
pundits give moralistic diatribes admonishing citizens to join the ‘adult’
conversation underway and consent to the social spending cuts that ‘must’ be
made.2 In this monological conversation, we are told that ‘we’ have been living
beyond our means and can no longer afford twentieth century ‘entitlements’
and ‘cradle to the grave’ social programs (e.g. social security, healthcare,
welfare, public pensions and education). We must learn to expect less from our
governments; we cannot afford to do otherwise. As they regretfully inform us
of what must be done, the picture of society politicians produce is one where
‘we’ all must sacrifice as individuals for the common good.
However, the use of the term ‘we’ and the picture presented by politicians
mystifies the capitalist economy, the causes of the economic crisis and the
class nature of austerity as the ‘solution’. We are, for example, not equally

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INTRODUCTION

responsible for the state of the economy, nor are we bearing devaluation and
austerity equally. ‘We’ are not all in this together but rather some are profiting
at the expense of others as corporate profits have rebounded while workers
face unemployment and falling wages (Rampell, 2010, Nov. 23). To be sure,
financial corporations deemed ‘too big to fail’ were criticized for taking public
money and not making the sacrifices others were making in the initial stages of
the crisis. However, now that corporations are posting record profits and
appear self-sufficient the most pressing concern is public debt.
As governments are hobbled with massive levels of debt, blame is shifted
onto public sector workers whose social protection from some of the worst
effects of market competition is looked upon as both a luxury ‘we’ cannot
afford and as being unjust.3 In the dominant discourse, the class character of
austerity is first occluded and then re-interpreted as a conflict between public
workers and private workers. Thus rather than policies that increase already
massive wealth inequality, it is public workers that are derided as obstacles
preventing a return to collective prosperity.
This pseudo class war rhetoric is supported by the neoliberal4 belief that
justice demands “equal inequality”5 (Lemke, 2001, p. 195), a distorted notion
of equality that operates as an exemplar for privatization policies that purport
to increase efficiency and accountability while ridding taxpayers of parasitic
public sector workers. The drive for equal inequality or equal precariousness
provides the moral justification supporting neoliberal criticism of such
disparate targets as
Labour unions, tenure in education, ‘government jobs’, corporate
bailouts, welfare and (to a lesser extent, and in its more populist form)
transnational monopolies and oligopolies . . . those who still have some
protection from full exposure to market forces are likened to an
aristocracy and accused of living off advantages gained in the past
(labour or social protections won through past struggle) and being
supported by the ‘productive’ members of society who toil in the open
field of the unforgiving market (Arthur, 2011, p. 193)
Equal inequality is promoted as a condition of maximum liberty in which each
individual is free from the coercion of the state and able to choose amongst the
options that are available in the market or create market options of their own.
Neoliberals’ hyper concern for negative liberty aligns with both austerity
measures that destroy state-funded social programs and a political discourse
that represents the social world as riven with class warfare between public
workers and private sector workers/taxpayers. Public workers, primarily
because of higher unionization rates, are disciplined less by the market and are
thus criticized for not ‘pulling their weight’ or contributing their ‘fair share’ to
help support the needs of the free market economy qua nation.

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 INTRODUCTION

Given that equal inequality is both a normative and ontological description

of our freedom, public workers who try to shield themselves from the market
are viewed as not only unjust but also ignorant. For neoliberals, resistant public
workers who do not understand the ‘injustice’ of shielding themselves from the
market at taxpayer expense, and of doing so when others cannot, will learn
“the hard way, that without a growing economy, all the labor-friendly laws and
regulations in the world won’t keep them working” (McGurn, 2011, Jan. 4,
para. 4). In other words, if they do not understand the ‘injustice’ of their
demands, public workers will be taught that their demands are ‘unrealistic’ or
hopelessly ‘utopian’ as investment dries up because capitalists cannot make the
profit they ‘need’ in order to ‘create’ jobs and supply the government with the
taxes that pay public workers’ salaries.

READING THE WORD AND THE WORLD

In the midst of the assault on public workers and collective economic risk
management formations and practices (unions, public pensions, social security,
etc.), consumer financial literacy education is promoted as an empowering
individual solution that can help consumers understand the complex and
constantly changing financial marketplace. In the absence of collective
protection from market forces, financially literate workers qua consumers are
assumed able to manage their increasingly individualized economic risk and
provide for their financial needs (e.g. retirement, education, health care, etc.).
The solution is not to limit the market’s influence but to learn how to better
individually respond to market signals; and while this may help some, any
benefits consumer financial literacy education brings to the individual must be
weighed against its role in justifying further austerity and neoliberalization.
Consumer financial literacy education is, therefore, not neutral but
complements austerity policies; austerity and consumer financial literacy
education are two sides of the same neoliberal coin. Austerity measures clear
the ground of collective forms of economic risk management and ‘shock’ the
working class into passivity while financial literacy initiatives offer resources
and practices that give the devastated working class the tools to reinvent
themselves as entrepreneurial consumers who see no other option but to
consent to ongoing austerity and insecurity.6 Consumer financial literacy
education is therefore, among other things, an element in the hegemonic
apparatus of the capitalist class, which alongside other elements enables the
capitalist class to conceal and reinterpret its exploitation of the working class,
garner consent for its exploitation and neutralize citizens' ability to formulate
and carry out alternatives to the neoliberal project. Through austerity measures,
pseudo-class war rhetoric and individualized solutions such as consumer

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INTRODUCTION

financial literacy education, the crisis, rather than being used as an opportunity
to create an alternative economic system and political discourse, is used as an
excuse for continued neoliberalization.
Consumer financial literacy is not characterized here as a solution but a
technology that mystifies and supports the very problems that financial literacy
education ought to help citizens overcome: exploitation, economic crises,
insecurity, alienation and the further disempowerment of citizens. Instead of
consumer financial literacy education, I make a case for a critical,
emancipatory financial literacy education that supports citizens who can see
the hypocrisy of demanding austerity from the working class while CEO
salaries increase by 23% (Joshi, 2011, July 2) and proposals to close tax
loopholes or increase taxes for the wealthy and corporations are derided as ‘job
killers’, if not an attack on our freedom. The citizen I am proposing is not the
alienated consumer-citizen who can only choose what the market provides but
one who can alter or create a new economic system that offers better choices.
In the place of a consumer-citizenry we ought to support a critical citizenry
that can reflect on and transform the social relations of production so we can
create a world in which individuals, liberated from capital's dictates, are as free
from necessity as possible and able to develop their human capacities to the
fullest.
The preceding may seem overly bold for a field that, with rare exceptions
(Arthur, 2011; Erturk, Froud, Johal, Leaver, & Williams, 2007; Pinto, 2009;
Williams, 2007; Willis, 2008), finds little fault in advocating knowledgeable
consumption of financial products as a solution to problems caused by
capitalism. Additionally, highlighting the antagonism between the passive,
private consumer and the active, public citizen is difficult to understand within
a paradigm that reproduces the view that there is no opposition between the
private interests and desires of the consumer and the public concerns and
duties of the citizen. The well-known financial literacy activist, John Hope
Bryant exemplifies the dominant assumptions of the field:
Financial literacy, or what I call “silver rights”, is the next civil rights
issue in America and worldwide. The Silver Rights Movement
recognises that everyone–black, white, brown, red or yellow–wants more
green (the colour of currency in the US) . . . For the US and others
looking at strategies for creating jobs in their respective economies, we
need to return to an environment that encourages small businesses,
entrepreneurship and self-employment projects, and all of this starts with
understanding the “language of money” and financial literacy. (Vice
chairman of the U.S. President's Advisory Council on Financial Literacy
John Hope Bryant, 2010, para. 2)

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 INTRODUCTION

However, against Bryant and most within the field of financial literacy
education I argue that being financial literate must amount to more than the
ability to understand the difference between real and nominal interest rates or
how compound interest works. In addition to teaching mathematical skills,
educators should be concerned with who a particular manifestation of literacy
serves (Pinto, Boler, & Norris, 2007, p. 86). Currently, most financial literacy
educators teach personal money management as if it was an effective solution
to socially created economic risk and researchers debate questions of
measurement and pedagogy without critically inquiring into first whom
consumer financial literacy education best serves and what subjectivities and
possibilities consumer financial literacy education supports, masks and helps
foreclose. Rather than inquire into the merits of creating consumer-citizens in
place of other subjectivities they blithely measure the effects of different
instructional strategies aimed at inculcating the ‘right’ technical knowledge
these consumer-citizens will require when carrying out their self-interested
‘civic’ consumption.
To begin on some common ground, most teachers and researchers would
likely agree that the function of literacy is to enable one to do something (i.e.
act and reflect). Literacy is in this sense a technology and like all technologies
extends our human powers. However, this extension is never neutral given that
literacy is never a universal ‘Literacy’ but is always a particular type of literacy
that supports certain actions and reflections over others. Defining financial
literacy as ‘consumer financial literacy’ and the ends of financial literacy
education as teaching students to manage economic risk through effective
private consumption marks out a specific area within which certain qualified
individuals can search for the necessary knowledge ‘literate’ individuals need.
Outside of this area of ‘legitimate’ inquiry, however, are financial literacy
goals that are devalued and concerns that cannot be understood as financial
literacy problems. An aim of this book is to persuade the reader of the need to
expand the area of legitimate inquiry to include economic or financial
problems that cannot be addressed within the current disciplinary boundaries
of financial literacy education.
To be a financially literate and responsible citizen requires more than
avoiding bankruptcy, giving to charity, adequately calculating financial risk or
even cultivating the disposition to hold back from blatantly ripping off low-
income customers with variable rate mortgages that one then sells to others
who take on the default risk – though these skills and virtues are obviously not
without significant merit. It requires that we understand our responsibility for
socially created economic risk so that we can act responsibly and be held
responsible for the effects of our collective producer and consumer actions
(some having more responsibility than others). These effects go beyond the
current financial crisis and include effects (structural unemployment, poverty,

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INTRODUCTION

shortened life-expectancies, starvation, etc.) that occur during what are called
‘boom-times’ and which require collective responses rather than individualized
consumer responses that place some at a distinct disadvantage vis-à-vis their
fellow competitor consumer-citizens. To be a financially literate citizen
requires, in the words of Paulo Freire, the ability to read the world as well as
the word (1970/2006). Financial literacy education ought to support our civic
duty to, in concert with others, alter how we produce, distribute and consume the
fruits of our collective labour so that we can create, if we so choose, new
conditions (i.e. new relations of production) that will support and create different
choices (less work hours, guaranteed income, more equitable share of the surplus
created, etc.). The choice I highlight is not the consumer’s: financial illiteracy or
financial literacy. Rather, as citizens I argue that the choice we face is between
learning how to accommodate ourselves to perpetual competition or being able
to understand and alter an economic system that promotes alienation, insecurity
and exploitation.

ORGANIZATION OF THE CHAPTERS

The first chapter presents a textual analysis of the dominant consumerist view
of financial literacy education using texts supportive of Ontario, Canada’s
2011 financial literacy education initiative. The texts analyzed include policy
documents and speeches from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD), the Canadian federal government, the Investor
Education Fund (IEF), Junior Achievement, the Council on Economic
Education, Jump$tart, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE)
and the Ontario provincial government. While the focus of this book is on the
financial literacy initiative aimed at students in grades four to twelve in Ontario,
international organizations such as the OECD and Junior Achievement, and
US-based organizations such as the Council on Economic Education and
Jump$tart are also included because they produce resources that through
conferences, the Internet and policy diffusion influence financial literacy
education in Ontario. Additionally, the inclusion of financial literacy education
texts from US based and international organizations expands the scope of my
analysis beyond Ontario, Canada.
In the second chapter I explain why consumer financial literacy education
will be ineffective in managing socially created economic risk. To this end I
first elucidate capitalism’s tendency towards overproduction and crisis through
a Marxist analysis of the recent economic crisis. Following this I move into the
realm of financial capitalism and outline how consumer financial literacy
education mystifies the character and practice of the hyperreal financial
economy and its relation to the real. This second section points to the particular
crisis tendencies that characterize the hyperreal financial economy’s debt

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 INTRODUCTION

securitization and speculation accumulation strategies – strategies that

consumer financial literacy education aims to help us participate in rather than
critique, effectively ameliorate or overcome. In the third section I elucidate
capitalism’s “creative destruction” (Schumpeter, 1942/1987) – the inherent
drive to create newer, more profitable forms of production while destroying
older less profitable forms – and the limits this logic places on the
effectiveness of a consumer financial literacy education to assist individuals
manage post-Fordist risk during even expansionary phases of capitalist growth.
The second chapter makes a case for the ineffectuality of consumer
financial literacy education in managing economic risk and argues that
capitalism, as an exploitative system that necessarily creates economic risk,
inequality and crises, should bear the responsibility for post-Fordist risk
and economic crises (not the individual, deregulation or hyperreal finance). In
other words we all (though some more than others) bear responsibility for
reproducing economic risk, inequality and crises through an aggregation of
individual producer and consumer actions that follow social, economic and
political practices we continue to recreate (practices that constitute
capitalism as an economic system). Only a change in the economic system
could bring an end to these recurring crises, a return to a gentler, nicer
capitalism is not enough. If we are truly concerned with freedom, capitalism,
an exploitative and crisis-producing economic system, must be abolished and
replaced with an economic system that allows all to be as free as possible from
necessity and crises. This is obviously a controversial position, and there is not
enough space to argue this position as forcefully as needed. However, I hope
that the reader will agree that citizens ought to understand the restrictions
capitalism places on their and others’ freedom, restrictions that are masked by
the facile belief in the mutually supporting relationship between freedom and
capitalism that currently reigns and is reproduced in consumer financial
literacy literature.
Having argued that individual consumer solutions to socially created
economic risk are logically unhelpful and morally bankrupt, the third and
fourth chapters borrow from Foucault’s strategy of genealogical critique7 and
elucidate the historical and ongoing contingency of the financially literate
subject and financial literacy education. Though consumer financial literacy
education is a response to the increasing financialization of capitalism and the
rolling back of state social programs, its particular character and the ease with
which it is adopted unproblematically are the result of the constitution of past
contingent subjectivities and resources. The third chapter takes liberal and
neoliberal subjectivity as the objects of analysis while neoclassical economics
and consumer education are the focus of chapter four. The third and fourth
chapters hope to demonstrate that consumer financial literacy education’s
character is not ‘natural’ and without liberal and neoliberal subjectivity,

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INTRODUCTION

neoclassical economics and the contingent outcome of various consumer

‘education’ initiatives, financial literacy education would likely have had a
different character. The goal is to illuminate its historically constructed nature
and show how financial literacy education’s particular construction limits our
individual and civic freedom, security and responsibility so as to expand
our view of freedom, responsibility and security beyond their consumerist
confines. If we are to be more autonomous and responsible (i.e. citizens rather
than consumers), illustrating the historically constructed nature of consumer
financial literacy’s supports and critiquing these supports as inadequate is a
necessary first step before positing a critical financial literacy education that
could assist citizens.8
The fifth chapter extends this genealogical strategy through a semiotic
analysis of consumer financial literacy knowledge production and
consumption. The first section of the fifth chapter presents an analysis of how
consumer financial literacy education is influenced by the financial industry.
This is followed by three sections, which analyze the influence of the present
consumerist sign environment, the policing actions of capitalist class agents
and the logic and rhythm of commodity sign production on financial literacy
production (i.e. the production of financial literacy texts and the act of
education). The aim, as in the third and fourth chapters, is to denaturalize the
production of consumer financial literacy texts and education by elucidating
and critiquing their naturalizing supports. The fifth chapter’s brief concluding
section argues that the continual (re)creation or creative destruction of signs
masks the ineffectuality of consumer financial literacy education argued for in
chapter two and supports blaming a particular manifestation of financial
literacy education, the teacher, student or a particular mode of financial literacy
instruction rather than the project of consumer financial literacy education
itself.
After arguing in the first five chapters that consumer financial literacy is
ineffective, political rather than neutral and promotes irresponsibility and
greater alienation, in the sixth chapter I provide an account of how, through
consumer financial literacy initiatives, the subject is encouraged to become
an entrepreneurial consumer – i.e. how it is that the individual is encouraged
to accept further alienation and civic disempowerment. In this chapter I pull
together the insights from the previous chapters and, drawing on Michel
Foucault’s concepts of governmentality, biopower and discipline, demonstrate
how consumer financial literacy education empowers us to carry out, and
reflect on, our material and symbolic actions while assisting in the creation of
ourselves as entrepreneurial consumers. The aim is to show how our freedom
is governed through strategies that use consumer financial literacy education to
support us in becoming entrepreneurial consumers.

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 INTRODUCTION

In the sixth chapter I argue that, as individuals create themselves as

entrepreneurial consumers, the feeling of responsibility for others and the
disposition and resources (language, space, practices, etc.) necessary to support
public action to alter the conditions under which they make choices are
increasingly destroyed. Moreover, individuals come to blame themselves and
others for the results of systemic causes that are beyond their individual
control. This chapter describes how the technologies of power and self
combine – in what Foucault (2003a) calls “governmentality” – not only to
discipline the individual but also to enlist the individual in disciplining his or
herself, further neoliberalizing society and increasing his or her alienation
and civic disempowerment. The goal of the first six chapters is to prepare the
reader to see the viability and moral and empirical necessity for a critical
financial literacy that will assist the critical citizen – the subject of chapter
seven.
The seventh chapter argues that the citizen should be more than an
entrepreneurial consumer and should instead be able to reflect on and alter
the very conditions that give rise to consumer choice. To support the
teaching of critical financial literacy, this chapter presents an outline of what
critical financial literacy should look like if we are concerned with educating
responsible citizens who can critically reflect and act to alter the economic
system that conditions their freedom. Following this chapter there is a short
concluding chapter summarizing the important findings of this book and
pointing to further areas of research within the field of critical financial
literacy education.

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INTRODUCTION

NOTES
1
The definition of class utilized here foregrounds the relationship between capital and labour
and the effects that derive from this relationship. The focus is on the power that ‘dead labour’
(capital) has over alienated ‘living labour’.
2
This is increasingly the discourse the Right uses in justifying austerity measures – see House
Republican Leader John Boehner as an example (Costa, 2011, Feb. 17).
3
See Bush & Gingrich, 2011, Jan. 27; Yakabuski, 2011, Mar. 11.
4
Neoliberalism is an ideology that justifies expanding and deepening market competition
throughout society on the grounds that this will increase our freedom and prosperity (and also
because there are argued to be no viable alternatives to neoliberal capitalism).
5
Although this vision and division of the social world as equal inequality is often resisted,
successful resistance depends on group mobilization in the name of some relatively well-
formed alternative as well as relative access to symbolic and economic capital. Hence the
success of Wall Street as opposed to Main Street in the United States in procuring the lion’s
share of state support following the economic crisis.
6
See Klein, 2007 for examples of this strategy.
7
“Critique is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal
value but, rather, as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute
ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying”
(Foucault, 2003c, p. 53).
8
For an elucidation of this strategy of critique see (Owen, 2003).

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