Sapience and the future of educational judgement

This article develops sapience as a distinct educational capacity, separating it from intelligence and learning. Drawing on Brandom’s inferential pragmatics, Wittgenstein’s reflections on rule-following, and Murdoch’s and Arendt’s accounts of moral attention, it argues that education should be understood as the cultivation of interpretive judgment rather than procedural efficiency. Under conditions of acceleration and datafication, sapience names the human ability to dwell within the space of reasons, namely to act reflectively and responsibly within shared norms of meaning. The article reconstructs the historical marginalisation of sapience through Enlightenment rationalism and platform governance, then introduces an ethics of attention as the ground of educational judgment. It outlines the temporal, pedagogical, and curricular conditions required for sapient learning and redefines educational freedom as the capacity for interpretive delay and moral responsiveness. The argument situates sapience as a normative ideal for education in an age where speed, prediction, and optimisation have displaced reflection and care.