ABSTRACT
Establishing Financial Literacy (FL) programs for K-12 students is an emerging concern for policymakers worldwide. Such programs esteem the market a preferred arena for economic decision-making than the civic arena. In parallel, media organizations in many capitalist economies are devoting increasing resources to popular coverage of finance, which could be regarded as an informal form of FL. We build on the distinction between episodic and thematic framing to consider two divergent approaches to FL in Israel: one developed by a non-profit for use in public education and the other developed by a commercial news organization for broader dissemination. We found that the commercial news organization blended episodic and thematic framing to contextualize financial products and institutions temporally and spatially, uncovering the political processes that shape the economic landscape. This paper argues that such a civic and critical approach to financial literacy hails students as citizens with the capacity to reform and re-imagine finance, rather than act solely as passive consumers.
7. Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Ella Anghel for her research assistance.
8. Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 For example, see a link to the first chapter of the CET program, http://finance.cet.ac.il/ShowItem.aspx?ItemID=42dfcbf4-1030-4ae8-861c-c9de008ad85a&lang=HEB.
2 For example, see a link to the first chapter of Money Time, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2daookm_v4k.
3 ‘Bibi’ is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s commonly used nickname by both his supporters and those opposing him.
4 See (Maurer, Citation2012; Schor and Fitzmaurice, Citation2015) on alternatives to mainstream finance such as rotating credit societies, non-statist currencies, time-banks and other forms of ‘connected consumption’ which are not dependent on the banks and traders featured approvingly in the CET series. In addition, while TM focuses on crises, critical pedagogies of place emphasize that teaching cannot only be focused on calamities, and should also emphasize positive experiences (Gruenewald, Citation2003). A discussion of potential alternatives would serve such a role in FL.