The Fast Track Leads to the Empty Hand
by Araminta Star Matthews
There is a controversy in the world that is astonishingly surprising and ironic. It seems to have emerged in recent times when the world’s Dunning Kruger syndrome reinforced its erroneous self-position that it was, in fact, a great educator! And all we need to do to teach someone is give them a shoddy YouTube short made by a who-knows-who[m] with a blog post by AI and huzzah! You’ve taught someone something!
Because honestly, what could possibly be more controversial in 2026 than getting an education?
Attack What We Think We Know:
The attack on learning was a boiling potted frog situation. I Cassandra-predicted it a few years ago when I saw the decline in student work and the increase in shortcuts. I get it. As an early, gifted writer, I did not always use my writing powers for the work of the Jedi. Occasionally my pen-saber glowed red as the Dark Side pulled me to use my gift for less than the good of all. A sell-sword, as it were, I would absorb in those pre-nanite days the entirety of a bookshelf of knowledge and regurgitate it for a client because I had been blessed with a skill few had back then: The ability to write in vivid or mimicked diction with exacting grammatical construction and accurate citation style.
My Shadow’s Shedding Skin
Like most Jedi, I had to be lured by the Sith before I could learn that the Jedi’s path is the only true path. As Karl Jung once opined, we have inside of us each both a light-dweller and a shadow-self. The light-dweller is the version of our self we allow the world to see, unmitigated by filters and glitter. The shadow self, though, is that part of our identity that we keep in the dark because we fear that others will push us away if they see that Elephant Man of a being shambling into our space, a part of it all along.
We fear that we’ll be seen as monsters for no other reason than being a shadow just as Joseph Merrick (nicknamed “The Elephant Man” by the circus for which he performed) was seen as a monster for no other crime than being born with deformities. Instead of hiding in an attic, at least, Merrick jaunted his shadow into the light and used it for all its seemingly-monstrous glory to earn money in a desperately poor point of history. And in the process, he also showed the world that the real monster is the person who judges another with only a mirror’s reflection (a surface) to navigate that judgment.
I long ago dropped my fear of shame and let my Shadow fly freely. Shame is a wasted emotion. It weighs us down with the rocks others use to fill our pockets with their ideas about what we should be and how we should behave in order to be loved, accepted, worthy, alive. But the truth is that we are worthy for no other reason than existing. And those rocks? They are not Y[OUR] rocks. They have been placed there by other people and their twisted ideals about who we are meant to be by their standards. I live by my standards. I am my own me: My Shadow and I are sewn together quiet comfortably, Tinkerbell, and I need no mother or child-self to threaten separation (J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy).
You see, my Shadow is as much ME as my light-dwelling self is. They are two sides of the same coin. I cannot have my crown without my emblem. No heads without tails. No light without shadows. And so I know that the truth of myself is not simple: I am more than the surface you see—or better still, I’m more than the surface you think you see. I am a complexity of stardust and seeds swirling within a constant state of I am and I am able to be better’s.
We ALL are.
And this is where education has become so controversial. Somehow, we have come to believe through the echo-chamber cacophony of that phone in our pocket telling us on repeat how smart we is that we have stopped looking for the things that verify those alleged belief structures. We no longer follow the Ladder of Inference down the rungs to figure out exactly why we think it’s smart to hide our tattoos and piercings from potential employers or pretending that our mental health and emotional landscape doesn’t exist so others don’t feel uncomfortable by our, dare I say it (?! ze gasp!), humanity! (duh, duh, duhhhhhhhh).
Anecdotal Fallacy:
No, we walk through the world assuming we know everything we know. After all, I just saw someone shot by a local. Surely my experience means crime is on the rise? (Even if I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and as one person living amongst tens of thousands, I’m the only one who saw that crime and statistics show crime is actually decreasing). Surely witnessing an action is all I need to create a belief, and a belief is all I need to have a fact, right?
Right? I mean, right?
So no. Not right.
Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc Fallacy:
If I happened to give my child a vaccine and four years later she was diagnosed with Autism, then surely that means I gave my child Autism with that vaccine. It couldn’t possibly be the myriad other things that occurred in my child’s life over those four years—the amount of screentime to which she was exposed, the underrepresentation of empathetic life-skill training by a mom (or dad) made absent by her own screentime, a lack of independence-building in the outside world, or perhaps something in the DNA code just waiting to unwind at the right moment in her biological clock. Nope. It has to be the vaccine.
Right? I mean, right?
Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc, or “After this, therefore because of this” happens when we mix up correlation with causation. We see two things that occur roughly around the same time and because they happen in the similar timeline, we presume that they are causing one another. The reality is, though, that there are a billion correlations that mean nothing at all and causation is much, much harder to prove. Causation, of course, is when we are able to say definitively that a precipitating factor led to another outcome. For example, after years of study, we were able to say definitively that gravity is the outcome of centrifugal force. But correlation says gravity might also be because we have mass, we don’t have feathers, the world turned out not to be flat, the moon gives us a little drag, the sun is magnetic, Venus is a flytrap ;), and who knows what else.
So no. Not right.
Equivocation Fallacy:
And if our country has a document that underpins everything that makes it what it is, then surely anything the Commander-in-Chief of that country does is supported by that document and thus legal and prudent. After all, isn’t the Commander-in-Chief the country-elect? And isn’t that document the document we created? Surely one and the other are the same, then.
Right? I mean, right?
An equivocation fallacy happens when someone uses the same word or phrase with two different meanings in the same argument, making the conclusion seem logical even though the meaning has quietly changed. In plain English, it's like "switching definitions in the middle of the conversation." For example, someone might argue, "The President represents the country. The Constitution is the law of the country. Therefore, whatever the President does must be constitutional." Here, the word country first refers to the nation and its people, then shifts to mean the President himself. Because the meaning changes without notice, the conclusion does not logically follow from the premises. Critical thinking requires that important terms keep the same meaning throughout an argument.
So no. Not right.
Comin’ Round to Put it Back the Way It Outta Be:
The tragedy is that anecdotal logic fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc, and equivocation are no longer confined to philosophy classrooms or debate clubs. They are not strictly the domain of the information literacy professor at her podium with her long-armed chalkstick clacking at a Blackboard, nor still are they they domain of the digital professor vetted by nearly 25 years of distance education in its many iterations and trained, as it were, to literally design a digital space that mimics a physical classroom with all its chalkdust and projection. We professors have become scapegoats for libel while students, embolded by their tilted self-belief that their Dunning Kruger is far more valid than 30 years of experience and 10 years of education besides, write scathing reviews about us rife with lies (largely by misrepresentation of fact) and think this is an okay world in which to live.
These logical errors have become a political strategy, a marketing tactic, and, increasingly, a weapon wielded against education itself. Around the world, words are stripped of their shared meanings and repurposed to inflame, distract, or divide. Freedom becomes permission to reject expertise. Research becomes any Internet search that confirms a preexisting opinion.
Critical thinking becomes agreement with one's own ideology, while education is recast as indoctrination whenever it challenges comfortable assumptions. We cannot learn in comfort! Pascal reminds us that all the miseries of humankind exist when we dwell within the comforts of our own chambers and refuse to learn how to be out in the world beyond. When language is untethered from consistent meaning, truth itself becomes negotiable. Citizens who can no longer distinguish evidence from assertion or expertise from popular-opinion become far easier to manipulate. That is not an accidental byproduct of weakening education: It is one of its inevitable consequences.
And we boiling frogs are letting it happen.
Everytime one of our students says, “I just want a fast grade” on that public forum they use to libel their educators, those students are saying silently “because I have no interest in reality and prefer to live in an echochamber in the Matrix.” When we moved from the 120 credit hour degree to the 90-credit hour degree, shaving off the very classes that teach a person to question authority(!) and think for the self (!)—even if that authority is mine own as their educator, a question I would welcomingly embrace with vigor—we are training people to become complacent. We are preparing a populace for the shackles of someone else thinking for them.
Maybe it started when kids stopped reading 1984.
George Orwell warned us of this danger in this book. The Party did not simply forbid certain ideas; it redefined words, erased distinctions, and steadily reduced language itself until independent thought became increasingly difficult. Orwell understood that whomever controls language shapes the boundaries of reason. Education, then, is not merely the transmission of information but the preservation of precise language, intellectual honesty, and the courage to ask whether a word still means what it meant yesterday. When we abandon those disciplines, equivocation ceases to be a logical fallacy and becomes a political instrument. Anecdotal fallacy becomes a weapon for anyone unwilling to look beyond the mirror. And Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc becomes the shadow Wendy so willingly sewed back onto Peter’s foot for him, so maternal, so helpful that he didn’t have to face it and had a Helicopter (Pixie Dusted?) Mom ready to do it for him.
So, how do we put it back the way it outta be?
We begin by remembering that education is not the memorization of approved answers.
It is the lifelong discipline of asking better questions.
It is the quiet courage to pause before accepting a claim because it sounds right, feels right, or comes from someone we admire.
It is learning to recognize when words have been switched mid-sentence, when anecdotes masquerade as evidence, when authority pretends to be truth, and when certainty outruns reason.
The greatest threat to any democracy is not disagreement; it is a citizenry that has forgotten how to think with precision, curiosity, and intellectual humility. If we want healthier communities, more resilient institutions, and a future worthy of our children, then we must defend education. We must fight for not merely a system of schools, but as the shared human practice of seeking truth with integrity, even when that truth asks us to change our minds.
Oh, and one last tiny nugget in case this escaped you: Those of us who have trained as serious academics (particularly those of us who live and breathe in the schools of letters, language, rhetoric, and meaning) develop a skill that may surprise even the most wary and weary student. We learn to recognize diction. We hear cadence. We see patterns. Every voice, written or spoken, carries its own rhythm, its own fingerprint, its own particular way of moving through the world. Language reveals us. Not because we are hunting for mistakes or waiting to catch someone in a contradiction, but because words are evidence of thought. They reveal what we value, what we fear, what we understand, and what we have yet to learn. A pseudonym may conceal a name, but it rarely conceals a voice (a diction). The way we construct arguments, the way we frame ideas, the words we choose and the words we avoid? All of these are pieces of the intellectual self we bring into the world. Your language matters because you matter. And it is also the thing that makes your anonymous words less anonymous to we academics.
And that is why I believe in education. Not because I want to control what you think, but because I care enough to help you learn how to think. I care about you because I care about my community. I care about my community because I have people I love who live within it. Perhaps that is circular reasoning of the most beautiful kind: We educate one another because we belong to one another. The goal has never been perfection. The goal has always been growth.
I want a world where we remain curious, where we question responsibly, where we use technology wisely, and where we remember that no tool—no matter how powerful—can replace the uniquely human work of interpretation, creativity, compassion, and connection. AI can generate words, but education teaches us how to decide which words are worth saying. It can produce images, but humanity decides what those images mean. The future does not belong to those who surrender their thinking to machines; it belongs to those who use every tool available while still protecting the imagination, empathy, and intellectual courage that make us human. That is the work of education. That is the work of becoming fully alive.
