Mar 23, 2026
Are There Mountains We Should Never Climb?
Reading Time:
6 Minutes
Category:
Ai in Education
Some mountains lose their meaning the moment they are conquered.
Are There Mountains We Should Never Climb?
Rising 6,638 meters into the thin air of western Tibet, Mount Kailash is not the highest peak in the Himalayas, but it is arguably the most significant. It is sacred to four major religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Bon. Revered by billions as the axis mundi, it is understood as the center of the universe where heaven and earth connect.
Yet, unlike Everest or K2, the summit of Kailash remains entirely untouched by human footsteps.
The mountain can technically be scaled. In 1936, the Austrian explorer Herbert Tichy ventured into the region and asked a local Garpön about the possibility of climbing Kailash. The leader replied with a cryptic redefinition of the act itself: "Only a man entirely free of sin could climb Kailash. And he wouldn't have to actually scale the sheer walls of ice to do it. He'd just turn himself into a bird and fly to the summit."
Decades later, the legendary alpinist Reinhold Messner, the first person to ascend all fourteen peaks over 8,000 meters, was offered permission by the Chinese government to climb Kailash. He declined. "If we conquer this mountain," Messner observed, "then we conquer something in people's souls. I would suggest that they go and climb something a little harder.
Instead of conquering the peak, pilgrims perform the kora, a grueling 52-kilometer ritual walk around the mountain's base. The spiritual value lies not in standing atop the summit in triumph, but in the friction, the physical toll, and the proximity to something that refuses to be instrumentalized.
This ancient practice contains a question that our age has not yet learned to ask. As we accelerate into the era of artificial intelligence, higher education is facing its crisis of conquest. We are building machines that can scale every cognitive wall, generate any credentialed output, and optimize information transfer with terrifying efficiency. But in our rush to automate the academy, we must ask something that technological capability alone cannot answer: Are there mountains in education that we should deliberately leave unclimbed?
The Illusion of the Sorting Machine
The debate surrounding AI in higher education has thus far been remarkably unimaginative. We have obsessed over plagiarism detection, the "productivity illusion," and the impending obsolescence of certain degree programs. We have warned of the cognitive debt incurred when we outsource our thinking, and we have proposed frameworks to ensure humans remain in the loop.
These arguments are necessary, but they concede too much. They continue to view education primarily as a logistical challenge, focusing on information transfer and skill acquisition that AI could potentially disrupt. To understand what is truly at risk, we need to look further back, into the history and philosophy of the university itself.
The medieval institutions of Bologna, Paris, and Oxford did not emerge merely as trade schools. They were literally sacred institutions, born of cathedral schools and organized around theology, the "queen of the sciences." They were granted academic sanctuary: protected spaces designed to insulate the slow, vulnerable process of human formation from the immediate demands of the state and the market. The university was never simply a place to acquire knowledge. It was a place that could change you.
This history is significant, as it elucidates the current stakes. In What Money Can't Buy, the political philosopher Michael Sandel introduces the "corruption argument." He posits that certain goods and practices are fundamentally degraded when subjected to the logic of efficiency and marketization. If you pay a child to read a book, you might increase the volume of pages turned, but you corrupt the intrinsic love of reading. The incentive changes the very nature of the activity.
Sandel has rightly criticized modern higher education for becoming a hyper-competitive "sorting machine" that promises mobility but often merely entrenches privilege. AI threatens to perfect this sorting machine. By optimizing the delivery of content and the assessment of outputs, AI can make the university's logistical functions vastly more efficient. But education is not merely the sum of its logistical outputs. When we apply the logic of total technological conquest to the university, we risk corrupting the very practices that make the institution valuable. We risk conquering the mountain, only to find we have conquered something vital in the student's soul.
The Sacred Zones of Formation
If we accept that AI will inevitably handle the bulk of information transfer and technical skill acquisition, what remains? What are the sacred zones of higher education that must be protected from optimization?
These are not merely "soft skills" or "human touches." They are the irreducible crucibles of human formation that require friction, vulnerability, and time. They all resist conquest for the same reason Kailash does: their value is tied to their difficulty.
1. The Apprenticeship of Judgment
Technical proficiency can be algorithmic; judgment cannot. Judgment is the ability to navigate ambiguity, to weigh competing moral imperatives, and to act wisely when the rules contradict each other. The result is not a transferable dataset. As the philosopher John Dewey argued, "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself". Judgment is forged only through the slow, embodied apprenticeship of watching a master practitioner, whether a clinical instructor, a thesis advisor, or a senior engineer, exercise wisdom under conditions of genuine uncertainty. AI can simulate scenarios, but it cannot bear the moral weight of a real decision.
2. Moral Formation Through Encounter. True education requires the risk of being profoundly challenged by another human being. It is the seminar where a student's deeply held conviction is dismantled by a peer, leading not just to a revised thesis statement but to a crisis of identity and eventual growth. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in her defense of the humanities, argues that education must cultivate the capacity for complex empathy and democratic citizenship. This process requires the existential stakes of a real encounter. An AI can facilitate a flawless Socratic dialogue, but the interaction remains sterile if it does not lead to human interaction, as the machine lacks any personal stake, capacity for shame, courage, or genuine conviction.
3. The Commons of Dissent
Historically, the university has functioned as a protected commons, allowing for the exploration of dangerous ideas and the challenge of orthodoxies. Such an environment requires a community bound by a shared commitment to truth-seeking, even when that truth is uncomfortable. AI, trained on the aggregated averages of human output and constrained by safety guardrails, inherently drives toward mechanized convergence and statistical consensus. It democratizes access to information, but it cannot create the institutional sanctuary required for genuine intellectual dissent.
4. The Covenant of Witness
Perhaps the most profound, yet least quantifiable, aspect of education is the act of being seen. A transcript is merely a record of transactions; a teacher is a witness to a human life. When a mentor looks at a struggling student and demands more because they see potential the student cannot yet perceive, a covenant is formed. This "pedagogy of belief" is the foundation of human transformation. An AI agent can track progress with infinite patience and granular precision, but it cannot bear witness. It cannot believe in a student, because it has no capacity for faith.
There is more to highlight and unpack as potential sacred areas in higher education and learning environments. These four areas are offered to showcase that this "mountain" has sacred areas worth protecting, worth fighting for.
Choosing the Kora
Taken together, these four zones point toward a distinction that German educational philosophy has long understood. There is a difference between Ausbildung, the training and acquisition of skills, and Bildung, the lifelong process of moral and cultural self-cultivation. For the last century, under the pressure of industrialization and the knowledge economy, universities have steadily traded Bildung for Ausbildung.
AI is about to force our hand. By commoditizing Ausbildung, making technical training and content generation ubiquitous and nearly free, AI strips away the utilitarian justifications that have masked the university's deeper purpose. Once we automate the logistical scaffolding, what remains is precisely what cannot be automated: the formation of a person.
We are left with a stark choice. We can allow the university to become a highly optimized, AI-driven credentialing engine, a frictionless ascent to the summit. Or we can reclaim the university as a space of Bildung, recognizing that the friction is not a bug in the system. It is the system itself.
We don't lack the tech to conquer Mount Kailash; we know that some things lose their meaning when conquered. The value is in the journey around the base, the struggle of the kora, and the transformation demanded by the mountain's presence.
In the age of intelligent machines, the survival of higher education will not depend on how quickly we can scale the peaks of cognitive output. It will depend on our courage to define the sacred zones of human formation and our discipline to leave those mountains unclimbed.
Are there sacred areas in higher education today, in your opinion? Is higher education a sacred mountain that needs protecting, or is it something that needs to change completely and adapt to the new world we created with AI?
References
[2] Tichy, H. (1938). Tibetan Adventure: Travels in the Unknown. Faber and Faber.
[3] Messner, R. (2001). Public statements regarding the Spanish expedition to Mount Kailash.
