ETHICS AND ECONOMICS. TEACHING MATERIALS FOR ECONOMICS AND PHILOSOPHY CLASSES IN 1ST YEAR OF UPPER SECONDARY EDUCATION

We prepare interdisciplinary teaching materials to be used and expanded on in classes of both philosophy and economics in 1st year of Upper Secondary Education. Our objective is to put forward a teaching perspective that connects with our students' daily life. To that end a critique is carried out of traditional economics with its foundation on a specific and biased understanding of human beings, social relationships and society as a whole, which directly contradicts human rights and does not stand up to philosophical critique. To overcome this, we introduce our students to an approximation of the principles of feminist economics and Carol Gilligan's ethics of care. With the birth of economics as a science in the modern world, a divorce between ethics and economics occurs. We propose using the concept of care as an ethical and economic value in order to overcome this divorce and demonstrate that ethics and economics are not opposite aspects of human experience but rather complementary aspects of human reality.
For that reason, we are going to use a didactic methodology that entails the development of small research projects to promote our students’ autonomous learning. The objectives that we aim at achieving with it are, on the one hand, to create significant learning from the contents related to daily life and foster a critical spirit in our students. On the other hand, we look forward to enabling them to identify the androcentric biases that lie beneath the subjects of philosophy and economics. Accordingly, the central focus of our didactic approach is on the concept of care both as an ethical value and as an economic value.