<p>Got my SAT coming up in about 2 weeks and I'm sort of anxious of the essay part because its the only part that I'm unsure about. Going to write an essay a day. Sorry for the spam.
Thanks!</p>
<p>Is it better for people to learn from others than to learn on their own?</p>
<p>Try to decipher the reason behind earth orbiting the sun on your own. Try to understand the logic behind calculus on your own. Try to learn interpersonal skills on your own. While some things such as eating and moving may be learnt on your own, much crucial knowledge is simply out of reach for the lone wolf.
Society has been developing for at least thousands of years, the wealth of knowledge amassed is written in history, what for? So that those that come after them have a foundation to build on, work with, and improve upon. All technology, whether it is mobile phones, or simply the process of manufacturing bricks, is the outcome of hundreds upon hundreds of improvements, each slightly better than the last. If each were to learn from their own, denying all access to previous innovations, the world would not have progressed nearly as much as it has.
The seemingly simple process of manufacturing a basketball is actually the epitome of leather making and sewing technique, all learned from others. The word poaching refers to the illicit stealing of animals, yet it has diverged to mean the stealing of ideas as well. Early leather makers poached each other ideas, in the hope of improving their own. But it means more than this.
There are two monoliths in today’s phone market, the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy. Samsung began producing its line of widescreen phones after it witnessed one of the biggest successes ever recorded in the business. It “poached” the idea from apple, improved upon it, and revealed an arguably better and certainly better selling line of phones.
Take, for another example, the mouse. The most commonly used computer accessory. Originally it wasn’t designed for the computer. In Apple’s early days, Steve Jobs “poached” the idea of the mouse and incorporated it onto the computer. Nowadays, a computer is hardly complete without a mouse.
Learning from others has been the bedrock of today’s advanced society. Everything we see is the result of generations upon generations of tweaking and changing. And society will continue to improve through learning from others. Possibly, 100 years from now, all we see will be rendered obsolete…</p>
<p>Did I go off topic? Because I think I did. And this time I wrote it without using a particular format because I feel so constrained using the universal template...</p>