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This paper presents an experience in Financial Education developed within the Bachelor’s Degree in Primary Education Sciences at the University of Molise, in collaboration with the Bank of Italy. The aim is to explore the value of combining theory and practice, considering university education as a laboratory for educational experimentation capable of generating concrete and transformative impacts in primary school contexts.

The hypothesis is that Financial Education can be configured as a pedagogical device capable of promoting awareness, participation, and social responsibility. The central focus of the experience is the transferability, in primary school settings, of the pathways experienced by future teachers.

Financial Education takes shape through authentic tasks, such as the collective management of a budget for a project or an event; shared reflection on personal spending priorities; discussion and debate on needs, desires, and the concept of saving in its multiple purposes; the use of role-playing activities to understand how supply and demand work and to practice early forms of conscious economic decision-making.

Even before the formal introduction of Financial Education into the curriculum and before our experience as university tutors, these themes were already integral to our teaching practice. Financial Education has indeed been adopted not as an additional content area, but as a cross-cutting perspective through which to interpret and organize meaningful learning experiences.

Through active methodologies, such as circle time, cooperative learning, storytelling, and problem solving, children were guided to engage in dialogue, negotiate, take responsibility, and reflect on the consequences of their decisions. Particular attention was also paid to the concept of social capital and to money understood as a tool oriented toward giving and solidarity.

In this context, Financial Education can be interpreted as a pedagogical practice aimed at enhancing children’s agency, supporting the development of critical and reflective skills necessary to understand the economic and social dynamics that shape individual and collective decision-making processes, and contributing to the promotion of their capacity for informed participation in economic and social life.

Within this framework, university teacher training assumes a strategic role in building a critical and responsible teaching professionalism, grounded in the integration of disciplinary knowledge, pedagogical-methodological competencies, and ethical-social responsibility, with the goal of designing educational practices capable of addressing early forms of educational disadvantage and exclusion, particularly in contexts characterized by socio-economic and cultural vulnerability.

To narrate and experience this process, therefore, means offering concrete tools to transform the classroom into a permanent laboratory of active citizenship, where educating about the value of money means educating about the value of choices— which ultimately shape the future of democracy itself.