Lauren+F.

Lauren Fleming Know-It-All media type="file" key="lauren.mp3"

When I was five, I thought my mom knew everything. I didn’t understand why she was going to college to learn more. If I asked her a question, I got an answer. Since then, I’ve realized that while my mom is a very intelligent woman, she doesn’t actually know everything. What she did know was that if we wanted to know something we had the means to find out. Living in such a technologically advanced time means that we have an incredible amount of information at our fingertips. Despite that, individuals will always find something they didn’t know before. After all, the more you learn, the less you know. I believe that people will never find a point when they know everything. Every day is a new opportunity for knowledge and insight.

That old adage, you learn something new every day, is truer than I realized when I was a kid. Learning and remembering interesting facts, as well as completely ridiculous and useless nonsense, always came fairly easily to me, so I loved it. I got a deep satisfaction in being right, from doing things well, and, most of all, learning new things. I was curious by nature. If I didn’t know something, I looked to my mother first, always a font of wisdom. Her response was, and still is, typically, “Look it up,” as if it were the simplest thing in the world. Which, of course, it was. I became very good at searching through the dictionary, and then later, as we became more dependent upon the Internet, quick to pull up Google. No matter what I was doing, I usually found something more I wanted to know. I was, and am, a complete bookworm, so words, concepts, and historical events were often brought to my attention through books. I’m always finding something new. Once, I misunderstood a word and used it in a sentence, completely baffling everyone in the room, and embarrassing myself exceedingly. My mom told me that when I said that my drawing, that I had been obsessed with for several weeks, was the “bane of my existence,” I was saying that it was a “thorn in your side, a pain in the ass.” I still don’t know how I misunderstood it, but since then, the dictionary has become my companion while reading, just to be sure. There’s no sense in learning something if you learn it wrong.

Our education plays a major role in our desire to learn. My mother was straight off the boat from Ireland, and she retains her citizenship there, even after half her of her life was spent in America. Once I asked her what schools were like in Ireland, and she told me, “They’re better than the schools here, and we were dirt poor.” As I learned more about the education systems, here and there, I better understood what she meant. I’ve heard more and more about art and music departments being shut down and realized how little most Americans value education anymore. New York State has one of the highest dropout rates in the country. The problem now is that people don’t always want to learn, so they remain ignorant of the past and the present. The education of ourselves and others should be the highest priority, especially when we have so much information available. People can always learn more, especially when they have so much to learn, but if they don’t choose to seek knowledge, there is only so much that others can do to teach.

There is always room for new discoveries in the world. If there wasn’t, there would be a lot of out of work scientists out there. As it is, our world is always changing. New words are added to the dictionary; new inventions are created and put into use; scientific theories are proven true or otherwise; historical evidence is discovered. When I was a kid Pluto was a planet. People are always learning, everyday. People who seek out knowledge won’t find everything. The more you learn, the more you realize how little you actually know. This I believe.