A Black Swan

A change in education is on the way ... it will be a Black Swan !

A Black Swan is an event with the following three attributes.

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.
Second, it carries an extreme impact.
Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

From Pedagogy through androgogy to heutogogy we need to pass on the responsibility of learning to the individuals and groups who are 'in' the process. The institutional nature of our schools and educational environments is counterproductive in this aim.

At TED 2008 on 29 February 2008 Nassim Nicholas Taleb the author of 'The Black Swan' spoke of these cataclysmic changes that we all recognise retrospectively.

In education terms, now, we have the chance to be ahead of the game. The digital environment in which we all live is sweeping chages over us by the year,month,week, day, hour, minute and second - changes we often don't recognise until we can't function the way we wish without them - just think of mobile phones, word processors, 24/7 online shopping ...

The secret is not to watch the big issues - Building Schools for the Future - but to listen to the whispers - Second Life. Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know... Black Swans being unpredictable, we need to adjust to their existence (rather than try to predict them). There are so many things we can do if we focus on anti knowledge, or what we do not know.


Andrew Marr on BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week - on Monday 3rd March interviews Nassim Nicholas Taleb (the podcast is now available at here):

'We are hard-wired not to truly estimate risk, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate and categorize – and we don’t even realise it. What we should understand, argues the academic and city trader NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, is that our world is dominated by 'black swans', highly improbable events that have a massive impact and are nearly impossible to predict. Black swans, he says, mean we should ignore ‘experts’, stop reading newspapers and learn to take advantage of uncertainty. Nassim Nicholas Taleb will be delivering lectures on The Black Swan at the University of Oxford on Wednesday 5 March and at the London School of Economics on Thursday 6 March.'