Why judgement depends on formation, not information
The Missing Question
Much of the current discussion about artificial intelligence in education is framed in terms of capability: what systems can do, how they perform, and how they might be integrated. A secondary layer addresses pedagogy: how teaching must adapt to a world in which many forms of execution can be delegated.
What remains largely unexamined is a more fundamental question: how judgement is formed.
This omission is not accidental. It reflects a deeper assumption, that judgement is a function of knowledge, or at most of reasoning, and therefore that any system capable of producing knowledge or assisting reasoning can contribute, directly or indirectly, to its development.
This essay begins with a different premise: judgement is not produced by knowledge or by reasoning alone, but by formation.
Formation as a Concept
Formation is not the accumulation of information, nor the acquisition of skills in isolation. It is the gradual structuring of how the world appears to a person — what is noticed, what is ignored, what is taken to matter, and what is not.
Formation can be defined as: the structuring of perception and disposition through repeated engagement with situations that require responsible responses, resulting in the capacity to discern what matters in a situation and to recognise when established frameworks no longer apply.
Each element of this definition matters.
Formation structures rather than accumulation. It changes how situations are perceived, not merely what is known about them. It concerns perception and disposition, not knowledge alone. It shapes both how one sees and how one is inclined to respond. Its effects are developmental rather than additive. What is formed cannot simply be retroactively substituted by later descriptions of experiences that were never actually lived through.
Formation also depends on a responsible response. The individual’s engagement matters because their judgement has consequences for which they must answer. What is formed is therefore not a store of answers, but a capacity: the ability to recognise what matters, to orient oneself in situations where rules do not suffice, and to act accordingly.
Formation, in this sense, cannot be reduced to increasingly sophisticated participation within an already established framework of practice. It concerns the transformation of the criteria by which situations themselves are interpreted — including the recognition that existing frameworks may no longer be adequate.
Experience and Transformation
Hubert Dreyfus’s account of skill acquisition provides a precise description of how this transformation occurs. The movement from novice to expert is not simply a matter of internalising more rules, but of a qualitative shift in perception. The expert does not merely apply rules more efficiently. The expert sees the situation differently.
This transformation depends on a history of encounters in which the individual’s responses mattered, where misjudgement had consequences, and where reality resisted reduction to pre-given categories. It is this exposure to resistant reality, rather than repetition alone, that produces the shift from rule-based reasoning to situated discernment.
What matters here is not practice in general, but a specific form of engagement: one in which the individual is answerable to the situation itself, rather than operating within a controlled system designed to guide or optimise performance. For this reason, not all forms of practice are equivalent.
Formation depends on participation in situations whose structure is not organised in advance around the learner’s development, and in which consequences arise from an independent world rather than from a system calibrated to the user.
AI-mediated environments, by contrast, are necessarily designed around responsiveness, optimisation, and alignment with user purposes. They reduce friction, guide action, and structure possible pathways through the environment. This is part of their usefulness. But it also creates a structural limit.
A system calibrated to the user cannot at the same time be genuinely independent of the user, because its responses remain oriented, at every level, toward the purposes for which it was built. Designed resistance remains generated within that horizon, and therefore cannot reproduce the indifference of a world that does not answer to the learner.
Even when resistance is deliberately introduced, it remains resistance organised for a formative purpose, not resistance arising from a world indifferent to whether formation occurs.
This is not primarily a limitation of current AI systems. It follows more broadly from the fact that any purposive system necessarily organises its responses in relation to the purposes for which it was designed.
The distinction at stake is therefore not between intelligent and non-intelligent systems, nor between digital and non-digital environments. It concerns whether the responses encountered are structured in relation to the learner’s formation or arise independently of it.
The issue is not whether AI systems are useful (they clearly are), but whether they can provide the kind of encounter through which judgement is formed. The answer depends not on computational sophistication, but on the structure of the relationship itself.
Difficulty and Formative Friction
A central distinction follows from this account: the distinction between difficulty and formative friction.
Difficulty operates within a stable framework. A problem is difficult when it requires effort, time, or skill to resolve, while the situation’s underlying structure remains intact. The individual works harder within an already defined horizon.
Formative friction occurs when the framework itself is no longer sufficient, when the situation resists interpretation according to the categories available to the individual. In such moments, the task is not to solve a problem, but to reconsider what the problem is.
Not all encounters with friction are formative. Friction becomes formative only when the individual remains engaged with the resistance, assumes responsibility for responding to it, and undertakes the work of reconstructing understanding in light of that resistance.
Absent this orientation, friction produces not formation but paralysis, avoidance, or mimicry without understanding.
Formation, therefore, depends not only on exposure to resistance but on a mode of engagement in which that resistance is taken seriously as a demand upon one’s own judgement.
Habituation and Structured Sensitivity
Aristotle’s concept of hexis provides the classical account of what is formed through such processes. Hexeis are not automatisms or habits in the narrow sense, but structured sensitivities to what matters in a situation.
Through habituation, the individual becomes attuned to relevant features of situations, not by mechanically applying rules, but by perceiving significance directly. This is the basis of phronesis, or practical wisdom: the capacity to act appropriately in situations that cannot be fully specified in advance.
Crucially, Aristotle’s account also establishes that the quality of what is formed depends on the quality of the situations encountered. Formation is not independent of context. It is shaped by the norms, practices, and expectations embedded within the environments in which it occurs.
Institutions therefore do not merely host formation. They actively constitute the conditions under which formation becomes possible.
Hexeis are shaped through what institutions reward, ignore, sustain, or leave unchallenged. For this reason, the character of an institution cannot be separated from the character of the judgement it forms: what an institution does not require, recognise, or sustain cannot be developed within it.
Plurality and Irreducible Encounter
Judgement is not formed in isolation. It emerges within a shared world in which others appear, respond, and resist.
Hannah Arendt’s account of plurality clarifies what this requires. Thinking is not simply the processing of information. It involves taking into account perspectives that are not one’s own, perspectives grounded in the fact that others occupy distinct positions within the world.
What makes these perspectives irreducible is not merely their unpredictability, but their origin. Each perspective reflects a situated existence rooted in a distinct history, position, and experience of the world, which Arendt describes through the idea of natality.
The world appears differently from each such position, and no perspective can be fully substituted for another.
Formation, therefore, depends on encounters with perspectives that are not generated on demand and whose responses are not structured around producing a particular effect on the learner.
A system that presents multiple perspectives can simulate content diversity. But it cannot reproduce the encounter with a perspective grounded in a history of situated existence that is not reducible to representation within the system itself.
The decisive point is not only that representations lack the existence they represent, but that they are generated within a system whose responses remain oriented toward the learner’s experience.
What gives such encounters formative force is precisely the fact that the other’s response is not organised for the learner’s development. The resistance emerges from an independent position, not from a pedagogical function.
The difference concerns the structure of the relationship between the learner and what they encounter, whether that encounter is organised toward the learner’s development or indifferent to it.
Educational Implications
If formation depends on encounters with situations that resist existing categories, then educational institutions cannot be organised exclusively around optimisation, guidance, and controlled progression. Students must encounter situations in which interpretation itself becomes necessary, situations where frameworks no longer fully settle what matters, and where judgement cannot be replaced by the efficient execution of procedures.
This has consequences for how educational environments are structured. Not every form of difficulty is formative. Repetition, challenge, and complexity may strengthen performance within an established framework while leaving the framework itself untouched. Formation requires something more demanding: encounters with situations whose meaning is not already stabilised in advance for the learner.
For this reason, educational institutions cannot be understood merely as systems for transmitting knowledge or coordinating competencies. They shape the conditions under which students learn to perceive significance, respond to irreducible plurality, and assume responsibility for interpretations whose consequences are real and not fully pre-structured for them.
The question raised by AI in education is therefore not simply how intelligent systems can improve learning outcomes. The question is whether educational institutions will continue to preserve the kinds of encounters through which judgement becomes possible in the first place.
Conclusion
If formation requires engagement with a resistant world, exposure to irreducible plurality, and the development of structured sensitivities through responsible action, then educational transformation must be evaluated in light of its effects on those conditions.
What is ultimately at stake is the formation of the capacities through which individuals recognise what matters, orient themselves amid uncertainty, and exercise judgement.
Education, therefore, faces a deeper question: whether it will continue forming human beings capable not only of operating within frameworks, but also of discerning when those frameworks no longer adequately respond to the situations they encounter.