Two people reach the same summit. The first spent forty days getting there: austerity, bare feet, a long walk up the hillside, and a worn flight of stone steps at the end. The second typed one sentence into a chatbot and had it in four seconds. Both arrive. Only one is changed by the arriving. That gap, between reaching a place and being remade by the reaching, is what the rush of artificial intelligence (AI) into education is in danger of automating away. The people who built our great pilgrimages understood it perfectly.
Consider the great hill pilgrimages. The striking thing is how much of the hardship is deliberate. Before setting out, a pilgrim keeps a long fast, often forty days: simple food, abstinence, bare feet. He carries a bundle of offerings on his head. The sanctum is reached only on foot, up a steep flight of sacred steps, and only by those who have kept the vow.
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