Risk

What is Risk?

As we search for the meaning in the current global pandemic of COVID-19, there are different ways to make sense of it. One way is to see this pandemic through the lens of risk. Risk is a concept that is prevalent in many disciplines and the term ʻriskʼ has been used in many distinct yet connected ways. Hansson (2009) distinguishes between five different definitions of risk: 1) risk as an unwanted event which may or may not occur; 2) the cause of an unwanted event which may or may not occur; 3) the probability of an unwanted event which may or may not occur; 4) the fact that a decision is made under conditions of known probabilities; and 5) the statistical expectation value of unwanted events which may or may not occur. The third, fourth, and fifth definitions are the most common in mathematics. The third definition aligns with the view that a risk associated with an event is a quantifiable uncertainty (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002), which is equivalent to the likelihood or probability of the event. This definition of risk is suitable when the events have similar consequences, but it becomes problematic if the impact of each event is different. For example, the likelihood of a person catching a cold is relatively large but its impact on the person’s life is most likely to be minimal, whereas the likelihood of getting killed in a terrorist attack is relatively small but the impact is immense. In order to account for both likelihood and impact, a proper understanding of risk requires the coordination between judgments of probability and impact (Levinson, Kent, Pratt, Kapadia, & Yogui, 2011), which corresponds to the fifth definition, the statistical expectation.

The question in education in general then becomes about how we teach about risk and how do we foster sound decision making about risk. Furthermore, it is helpful to introduce the concept of existential risk which can be defined as any risk that can endanger humanity as a whole and its existence such as global pandemics (including the current COVID-19 pandemic), consequences of climate change (e.g. catastrophic weather, sea-level rise, and migrations due to climate change), nuclear war, etc. In addition, we can think of existential risk as a risk that could lead to human extinction or civilizational collapse (Turchin & Denkenberger, 2018).

Education does not exist in a vacuum and that are various philosophical, societal, and political questions that need to be considered when describing how to teach and learn a certain subject (McGee Banks & Banks, 1995; Ernest, 2018). Here, we start with describing some epistemological, political, and ethical considerations about teaching existential risk in order to answer the question of how to help ourselves and others to make sense of risk in the educational context.