Knowledge as Wonder: A Journey Beyond Rationalism

A reflection on content knowledge, autistic ways of knowing, and the deep joy of learning—not as a task, but as a home. Wandering the liminal paths of myth, memory, and belonging, far beyond what AI can map.

Introduction

It was a Saturday morning like many others—one of those slower-paced days where I try, often in vain, to tame the ever-growing thicket of unread emails. Among the usual clutter—newsletters I don’t remember subscribing to, updates I didn’t ask for, and messages I probably should have replied to earlier—I came across a familiar name: Peter Greene. His writing, sharp and often wry, always offers something worth reading, so I settled in with a cup of tea and clicked through.

The piece, titled Content Knowledge Is Still Necessary, was a spirited defence of something that ought to be obvious, but increasingly isn’t: the value of actually knowing stuff. Greene traces the growing belief, one that’s lingered for decades and now finds renewed vigour in the age of AI, that students don’t really need to learn much of anything at all. After all, they can Google it—or now, ask an AI chatbot to do the thinking for them. He rightly calls this what it is: “dumb” and wrong. Learning, he argues, is not about outsourcing; it is a process, grounded in the accumulation and integration of knowledge.

Greene draws particular attention to the idea that AI could take over the “hard parts” of writing—coming up with ideas, crafting a thesis, drafting a response—leaving students to simply “edit” what the machine produces. He skewers this notion with a fair bit of justified exasperation. How can one revise a piece they didn’t write? How can they shape meaning when they had no part in creating it? Writing is thinking, and thinking requires knowing. AI, as Greene points out, is no calculator—its answers are often wrong, and even if they weren’t, writing has no singular solution. It’s not about getting the “right” answer, but about grappling with meaning.

All of this I agreed with. I found myself nodding along with Greene’s defence of content knowledge—not as some abstract ideal, but as the very soil from which all critical thinking grows. You can’t analyse what you don’t understand. You can’t evaluate sources if you lack context. His call to resist the allure of easy tech-driven shortcuts felt not only sensible, but necessary. And yet, as I read, I felt a tug, a whisper, a glimmer of something missing. Not a disagreement, but a different angle—a path adjacent to the one he walked.

You see, Greene’s argument, for all its strength, still treads the well-worn paths of rationalism. Knowledge, in his view, matters because it enables productivity, fuels critical thinking, and supports the measurable goals of education. Content knowledge is a means to an end—a worthy and essential means, but still in service to outcomes. But some of us walk in different woods, with different signposts. For us, knowledge is not a ladder we climb to reach a goal. It is a forest we inhabit, not because we are lost, but because it is home.

A Different Path: Autistic Ways of Knowing

For some of us—particularly those of us who are autistic—knowledge has never been a tool to wield or a task to complete. It is not something we acquire in pursuit of grades, credentials, or accolades. Rather, it is a realm we inhabit, a landscape we navigate with the same instinct and attentiveness as a forager in the forest. Even as a young child, long before I had the language to name my neurotype or understand the world’s expectations, I found myself drawn to deep wells of knowing. I didn’t pursue knowledge to prove anything, nor to achieve some preordained goal. I pursued it because it called to me—quietly, insistently—and because in its presence, I felt most myself.

The poems I write now are woven from threads I began gathering in those early years, long before I had the words to describe what I was doing. Threads of memory and meaning, of myth and land, of what has been forgotten by the world yet remembered in the body. This knowledge is not the sort that can be tested or measured—it is not a set of trivia to be recalled on command. It is a felt knowledge, immersive and alive, that grows from within and reaches outward. It is the kind of knowing that informs A Stroll to the Mailbox, where a simple act becomes a sacred communion with the land and its caretakers—the jackrabbit, the quail, the coyote, each acknowledged, each greeted with reverence​. Or The Solitary Forager’s Time, which remembers a way of living and knowing that predates language and history, a time when to move through the world in solitude was not a failing but a way of belonging, of existing in harmony with a world that recognised difference without fear​.

For many autistic people—and I’ve noticed this especially among those of us who are also trans—this relationship to knowledge is not merely a preference or a quirk. It is a lifeline. We do not skim the surface of subjects to collect a few facts; we immerse ourselves. We forage knowledge the way others might forage food—not to stockpile it, but to sustain ourselves, to build meaning, to dwell within it. The forest is not something we walk through to get somewhere else. It is the destination.

AI, useful though it may be in its own limited way, cannot replicate this. It can simulate output, approximate coherence, summarise and mimic. But it cannot feel the resonance of a story passed down in whispers, or the electric joy of tracing a pattern so deeply that it becomes part of you. It cannot walk with us into those liminal spaces where knowledge becomes being, where it is not just something we know, but something we are.

It cannot unmask the self that was never truly hidden, only waiting to be remembered—as I explore in The Liminal World, a poem about shedding the constructs the world imposes and returning to the truth of our own rhythms, untamed and unafraid​. That is where we dwell—not in the neat compartments of outcomes and productivity, but in the wild, expansive spaces where knowing is an act of connection, of remembering, and ultimately, of homecoming.

Enter the Fae: Where Knowledge Becomes Memory

Topics like the fae, the sidhe, the hidden folk—whatever name you wish to give them—have long been dismissed in so-called rational discourse. To mention them in earnest is to invite scoffs or indulgent smiles, as if one has spoken out of turn at a very serious meeting. The world, we are told, has no room for such things. Faerie folk belong to children’s tales and superstitions, relics of a less enlightened age. And yet, curiously, even in the modern era, construction projects—especially in certain corners of the world—will quietly divert plans to avoid disturbing known faerie mounds or ancient sites. It is passed off as respect for tradition, or a nod to local folklore. But I cannot help but wonder: is it really just appeasement, or is there something older being remembered? An unspoken knowing, passed not through textbooks but through place, a memory inscribed in the land and in us.

Perhaps the land remembers. And perhaps, so do we.

For me, the fae have never been a matter of fantasy. Long before I knew the language of neurodivergence or had a name for the way I experienced the world, I was drawn to these stories—not as escapism, but as recognition. As an adult learning to read with fluency for the first time, it was Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer’s brilliant and mischievous world of underground fairies and high-tech magic, that captured me. Those books—sharp, irreverent, and yet deeply rooted in a different kind of knowing—became my sacred tomes. I read them again and again, each time discovering new layers, new delights. They weren’t merely “high interest materials”; they were portals. They invited me into a world that felt familiar, not in content, but in spirit. Colfer’s fae folk make their home in the Lower Elements—a vast subterranean world beneath the human one, hidden yet teeming with life and magic. It’s a setting that plays host to one of the series’ long-running jokes: the elite unit of faerie law enforcement known as the Lower Elements Police Reconnaissance, or LEPRecon—a playful nod to both military jargon and the mischief of the fair folk. The fae are not called the Lower Elements, but rather, they dwell there—beneath and beyond the surface world, not above it. And in that dwelling, in that apartness, I found something profoundly resonant. And I, like many autistics I’ve since come to know, felt an immediate kinship with them.

That kinship has never faded. My shelves now house more recent acquisitions—collections like the British Library’s Fearsome Fairies, edited by Elizabeth Dearnley, and Celtic Weird, edited by Johnny Mains. These books gather centuries-old stories from the old world, tales that echo with something ancient and persistent. They are not neat, not tame. They are stories of boundary-crossers, of beings who defy simple categorisation, who live at the edges of things—just as many of us do.

Rationalism insists that these are just stories. But I suspect there is more. I suspect that beneath the polite dismissals and academic detachment lies a faint unease, a recognition that the world is not as tidy as we would like to believe. And for those of us who are autistic—especially those who are also trans—these stories resonate because they speak in our language. Not the language of binaries or hierarchies, but the language of difference, of coexistence, of remembering a time when the veil between worlds was thinner, and mutual respect was not optional, but necessary.

The land remembers. And perhaps, so do we.

The Autistic-Fae Connection

Long before I had any inkling of words like “autism” or “neurodivergence,” I was drawn to stories of the fae—not as a means of escape, but as something that felt like recognition. There was an ease, a familiarity in those tales of beings who lived apart, who moved through the world by different rules, whose ways were bound to nature rather than to human constructs. Their otherness was not tragic; it was simply theirs. Their wariness of human meddling, their fierce independence, their tendency to vanish into the mist rather than conform—all of it spoke to something deep within me, something I did not yet have the language to name.

As I’ve grown older and connected with others—especially within the autistic and trans communities—I’ve realised this connection is not unique to me. There is a pattern, a rhythm that repeats itself. So many of us feel the same pull, the same affinity for the fae, the mythic, the liminal. It’s as if our neurotype is attuned to something that persists beneath the noise of the modern world—a quieter rhythm, one that still senses what has been forgotten, or perhaps what has been deliberately buried.

In Artemis Fowl, Colfer’s fae live in the Lower Elements, out of sight but never truly gone. “Let us proceed under the assumption that the fairy folk do exist, and that I am not a gibbering moron,” Artemis says early on, daring to suggest that the world is stranger—and richer—than most people are willing to admit. It’s a line that has stayed with me, because to believe in the fae, or in any knowledge outside the rationalist frame, is often treated as folly. Yet for many of us, it is truth. Not empirical truth, perhaps, but felt truth. Embodied truth.

Colfer also writes, “Crazy people are often more interesting than sane ones,” and in that cheeky observation lies something tender: the idea that those who live outside the bounds of normative thinking might actually see more, not less. Might be more connected, not adrift. That’s how it feels, being autistic in a world that tries to flatten difference. We are often told we don’t understand things correctly. But what if we understand things differently—and in that difference, remember what others have forgotten?

Maybe that’s why we find kinship with the fae—not as fantasy, but as mirrors. Like them, we dwell at the edges. Like them, we are wary of human constructs that seem more interested in control than in coexistence. Like them, we remember a time when the world was not measured in outcomes, but in rhythms. When knowledge was not about dominance, but about dwelling within the land, and listening.

It’s amazing what you can do, as Colfer wrote, “when you don’t know you can’t do it.” Perhaps we, like the fae, were never meant to be hemmed in by the binaries and boundaries of modernity. Perhaps we were meant to live in the in-between spaces, where knowing is not for power or profit, but for wonder. For home.

My ‘Temple of Knowing’

It’s a curious and beautiful thing, this connection so many of us share—not just to the fae, but to spaces that feel sacred, safe, and wholly our own. As I’ve spent more time among autistic and trans communities, I’ve noticed a striking pattern: the urge to create nooks, havens, corners of the world where our interests, our joys, and our curiosities can thrive untouched. These spaces are more than just collections of things—they are acts of reclamation, of self-definition in a world that so often tries to tell us who we are not.

For me, that act began with a single book—the first one ever given to me as an adult learner, at a time when I was just discovering the joy of reading for myself. That book wasn’t simply a tool for literacy; it was a key to something vast and resonant. I read it slowly, then again, and again. And eventually, I built a shelf for it. Then more books came, and with them, more shelves. Now, my home office and bedroom are lined with them—fourteen in total—each holding stories I’ve lived through, with many more waiting patiently in the to-be-read pile, their anticipation a joy in itself.

Among the hundreds of books, nestled quietly, are toys and plushies—bright, soft guardians of whimsy that make the space mine. This room, this refuge at the top of the mountain, surrounded by chaparral and jackrabbits, is more than just a place to rest. It is a testament to the life I have built, word by word, shelf by shelf.

The Reader’s Nook

I remember the first book,
pressed into my hands like a gift—
not of paper and ink alone,
but of possibility.

I was grown by then,
though the world said I was behind,
said I had missed the window.
But oh, how wrong they were.

I read it once—
slowly, carefully,
tasting each word
like a berry found in the wild.

Then I read it again,
and again,
each time carving a new path
through the forest of its pages.

I built a shelf for it,
small, sturdy,
a home for the book
that gave me mine.

Then more books came,
and more shelves rose—
until the walls of my room
sang with the voices of hundreds.

Fourteen shelves now,
lined with stories I have lived through—
every one read,
every one a step along the path.

Beside them,
toys and plushies nestle—
bright, soft companions,
keepers of whimsy, of joy.

This is my space,
my sanctuary,
where no mask is needed,
where I am whole.

Others like me—
autistic, trans, wondrous—
we build these nooks,
pockets of safety in a world too sharp.

Here, at the top of the mountain,
in the chaparral’s embrace,
jackrabbits greet me at dawn,
squirrels dash with familiar ease.

And out in the field,
a mound rises,
untouched by gopher or ground squirrel,
respected, perhaps, for reasons forgotten.

I nod to it, just in case—
for who’s to say
it’s not a sacred mound,
a memory of the ones who came before?

Here, I read.
Here, I dream.
Here, I remember
the wonder of that first book—
and all the paths it opened.

Knowledge as Resistance, Knowledge as Belonging

I have great respect for Peter Greene—his decades of experience in the classroom shine through in his writing, and his defence of content knowledge is both timely and necessary in an age that seems increasingly eager to replace depth with convenience. As a fellow educator, I recognise the truth in his words, the urgency in his call to resist the seductive ease of AI shortcuts and hollow skill-based education. Yet, I think he misses something—not out of neglect, but perhaps because it lies in the liminal, in a space just beyond the rationalist frame he so deftly occupies.

What’s missing is not the what of knowledge, but the why—the relationship some of us have to knowing that defies utility, that lives outside the narrow confines of outcomes and metrics. For many autistic and trans people, knowledge is not a currency or a credential. It is a resistance to erasure, to mandates of productivity, to the demand that everything we do must be justified in terms of its economic or social value. To know deeply, to wander the forest of a subject without needing a destination, is a quiet rebellion against a world that too often asks us to flatten ourselves to fit its moulds.

Knowledge, for us, is not something to possess—it is something to belong to. It is a place we co-inhabit, just as, in older times, humans and fae were said to share the land in wary coexistence. The stories we tell, the facts we cherish, the patterns we follow—they are not just tools for thinking. They are portals. They lead us to wonder, to memory, to connection—not only with the world around us, but with those who came before, and those who walk alongside us now, forging their own paths through the underbrush of knowledge, seeking not just to know, but to be.

Final thoughts …

Perhaps my poems are like leaving berries on a moss-covered stone, nestled at the base of a forgotten mound—a quiet offering to those who move unseen, to those who remember the old ways when the land breathed differently and knowledge was something felt, not quantified. Each verse, each line, a gift laid gently at the threshold between worlds, an acknowledgement that wonder still has its place, even now. Especially now.

These words I write are not maps, but trails—winding paths through the forest of knowing, inviting others to wander with open senses, to step softly and listen. Not to dominate, not to extract, but to co-inhabit the world of thought and memory, to feel the stories that linger in stone and stream, to see that learning is not always a ladder or a race, but sometimes a glade, dappled in sunlight and mystery, where one simply is. A place where even the breeze carries meaning, if only one pauses long enough to hear it.

And perhaps—just perhaps—I am touched, as the old folk used to say. Not in the clinical way the world now dissects such difference, but in the mythic sense, the fae-touched, marked by something ancient and elusive. Perhaps it was the fae who reached out all those decades ago, brushing against my soul when I was still too young to name it, setting me on this lifelong path through the liminal. There are mornings when the mist hangs low over the chaparral, when the jackrabbits greet me and the squirrels dart past the same undisturbed mound, that I wonder. Perhaps they know something I do not, or perhaps we all remember something we are not meant to forget.

Whatever the truth, I continue to leave my offerings—poems, stories, bits of knowing gathered like wild berries—along the path. Not seeking destination or approval, but simply sharing in the joy of it, the resonance, the belonging. And if that is being touched, then I am glad of it.