Economic Citizenship and Socio-Economic Rationality as Foundations of an Appropriate Economic Education

Abstract

In this article we argue that social science education needs to convey more than operational mechanisms of society. Especially in socio-economic education, questions of business ethics, i.e. phenomena of economics and society need to be integrated and reflected, decidedly focusing on the moral content of economics. With the introduction of economic citizenship as the ideal economic actor to be the purpose of economic education, this paper proposes that economic education needs to connect economic expertise and moral judgment and should also allude to the necessity of every market action’s conditional legitimization by society. We propose to discuss different ‘sites’ of morality as a heuristic approach to the different areas of economic responsibility. The individual, organizational and political level of responsibility helps to categorize the different moral issues of economic activity and serves as a great pattern to explain economic relations to scholars and students.