Chapter 9 Financial Literacy Education as a Public Pedagogy: Consumerizing Economic Insecurity, Ethics and Democracy Chris Arthur Abstract Financial literacy education (FLE) is not a technical, apolitical response to of floaded 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 peda- gogy, 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 ped- agogy 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. Keywords Financial literacy Á Consumerization Á Critical theory Á Capitalism Á Citizenship education 9.1 Introduction In a context of heightened global economic competition coupled with high levels of public and private debt, the institution of austerity and further erosion of welfare state institutions are presented as necessary, moral duties. Deficit spending may save jobs (and lives), but, chide austerity purveyors, it does not eradicate the root causes of the continuing economic crisis. The origins of the crisis they locate in public debt, labour inflexibility, demographic changes and government and corporate health and C. Arthur (&) Faculty of Education, York University, 4700 Keele St., Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: chrisrossarthur@gmail.com © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 C. Aprea et al. (eds.), International Handbook of Financial Literacy, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0360-8_9 113