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This was originally my long essay, but it bogged down and sounded depressing. I still like it, though, so enjoy!

            Socrates had it easy. In his day, to be wise one simply had to know that he knew nothing. There was one language in his world, and the great thinkers and playwrights from Greece were his contemporaries. Anicent history to me was his current events. For him to say, “The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance,” was easy because there was only one place to go to learn and debate all the Greeks believed there was – the agora. Only those with no interest in philosophy, which encompassed everything in those days, were not there and therefore were ignorant.

            The humanists of the Renaissance had it easy. They had only to learn what the Greeks and Romans wrote, and then a bit of history before it caught up to them. They only had to learn Greek and Latin to have a proper education, and there was one religion. It was easy for them to catch up, to understand all that was available to them in the world. Then, it was easy for them to create history, literature, science, machines, and philosophies.

I do not have it easy. Quite frankly, it’s impossible to catch up. The five hundred years after Erasmus and Thomas More have added more works, ideas, satires, utopias. Three hundred years ago, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton who were on the cutting edge of science are now the starting points to learn about cool astrophysics science fiction things. Not only are there far more (spoken, written, and computer) languages to learn, but dozens of religions, philosophies, and cultures with stories and mythologies of their own to understand. More knowledge is available and it’s easier to obtain than in the past. Not only is there an essential, base knowledge (which I need to beat Ken Jenning’s record on Jeopardy!), but I want to go beyond that and have a deeper, working understanding of everything.

            My education has not been a process of filling my head, but a progressive revealing of how much I don’t know, how much is out there for me to find and absorb. Every time I learn something new, I realize there is more to learn. More knowledge gets poured into my head every day, but the list of things I do not know and of books I have not read simply grows longer. My education cannot end with the completion of school, because more happens every day. My mother learned American history through the sixties, while I learned through the nineties. When I’m her age, the 9/11 attacks – a current event, something I lived first hand – will be something my children learn in school, just as I learned about Kennedy’s assassination as a part of history. In my lifetime, years of new discoveries and innovations will occur and I will learn about them in an attempt to keep up.

            When Socrates said, “The only evil is ignorance,” he could not have meant not knowing this was evil, because he also said, “He who is wisest knows that he knows nothing.” The race to catch up is important. Catching up never happens. Once the humanists caught up to the Greeks, they gave the world more. The evil in ignorance does not come from not being able to catch up. It comes from not running the race, from a closed mind.