Ask a room of students who taught them best over the course of a term and the honest answer, more often than institutions like to admit, is each other. Peer learning does something a lecture structurally cannot: it distributes the authority to explain, correct and validate understanding horizontally, among people who share the position of still figuring something out, rather than concentrating it vertically in a single credentialed source. This changes not just how material gets transmitted but who gets to decide that transmission has succeeded. AuthorityFragment names the way epistemic authority breaks into smaller, situational pieces under peer conditions — a student who explains one concept particularly well holds real authority for exactly that pocket of the material, then relinquishes it, rather than accumulating a single durable credential the way a teacher does. Institutions that only formally recognise the vertical form of authority are, in practice, running on a horizontal one they decline to name or resource.
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