Educating for Antifragile Futures: Infusing School Curriculum with Entrepreneurial Capabilities

Antifragility is a property of complex systems that enable systems to learn, grow, and prosper under conditions of disorder and uncertainty. In contrast, fragility is a property of systems that can only learn, grow, and prosper in conditions of order and stability, such as many contemporary societies that embrace modernity. This chapter challenges the fragility of contemporary thinking about education systems that tends to treat risk as predictable, thereby enabling a sense of foreseeability into the needs of future educational outcomes. By adopting antifragility as our frame of reference, it is illustrated how education could be more risk-responsive by infusing key human capabilities for promoting antifragility at individual and systems levels. Risk-responsive human capabilities are also entrepreneurial, and for this reason, the focus in this chapter is to explore a foundational conceptual framing of antifragility and how it may be operationalized through an entrepreneurial framework to transform systems for teaching and learning. The investigation is grounded in a re-analysis of a previously published case study of entrepreneurial STEM education project-learning in a school from Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Hong Kong). The Hong Kong context helps in illustrating antifragile and entrepreneurial concepts in a curriculum and systems context. This study makes recommendations for further research and opportunities for collaboration between education researchers and systems leaders.