Educational Task Instead of Educational Goal. The Common Good as an Object of Socio-economic Education

The common good is an elementary component of a didactic that seeks to place the economy within its social context. The didactic challenge is to avoid overwhelming school students with a predefined understanding of the common good, and instead enable them to develop their own insightful understanding of the common good. The contribution seeks to lay out the didactic basis for this. In a first step it is shown that economy and economics are subject to a structural relationship to the common good (Sect. 1). Understood as a political economy, the discipline has all the prerequisites for a differentiated examination of the common good (Sect. 1.1). However, if economic questions are analyzed in isolation from their social contexts, this leads to an ideologically condensed understanding of the common good that ignores the central common interests of democratic society (Sect. 1.2). In a second step starting points for an examination of the common good that does justice to the obvious heterogeneity of the common good will be elaborated with reference to groundbreaking considerations by Ernst Fraenkel (Sect. 2). The didactic conclusions are drawn on this basis: First, the development of an individual understanding of the common good is identified as an educational task (Sect. 3). Two central subject-didactic principles are elaborated: orientation on Beutelsbacher Konsens (Sect. 4.1) and confrontation with values and interests above and beyond the economic (Sect. 4.2). A problem study and conflict analysis is used to identify methodological starting points for an informed exploration of the common good in socio-economic teaching (Sect. 5). The central finding is that exploring the meaning of the common good is an education task (rather than a prerogative of didactics) (Sect. 6).