<p>It would be nice if someone would comment, critique, or whatever it is that people do to SAT essays to give me a realistic idea of what my essay may be graded as. It's 3 AM, pretty tired, but I decided to get this essay over with and get an idea if I should gather more conventional methods of writing or just totally be myself and write the essay as I please.</p>
<p>Prompt: Can knowledge be a burden rather than a benefit?</p>
<p>Knowledge is something we spend our whole lives working to acquire about the world. No matter what it is or how it’s found, the pursuit of it is an important investment of time. Oftentimes, discoveries may not always lead to direct application and the ideas of many are in a sense shelved to await the day someone can put what’s been found to use. However, at the rate in which original work is produced, the danger of having too much knowledge is nil. What world would this be if we had simply concluded we have burdened ourselves when in reality we only know a fraction of what there is to know about the universe?</p>
<p>As early as childhood, we grow up with a basic set of beliefs our parents implant to retain a traditional state of innocence. We beam under the Christmas tree in excitement before bed and leave out the milk and cookies for Saint Nick, wondering if we got the Barbie or Power Rangers action figure we had wanted. It varies, but the way I found out was nerf gunning Santa Claus for bringing me coal one year and being grounded for the next couple of weeks. It wasn’t as much as a burden to know that such figures were nonexistent, but the knowledge was definitely a benefit for me to become consciously aware that there was a definite line between real and the fantastical ideas we had as kids. Children might be temporarily hard-pressed but nonetheless benefit from it by stepping into a new stage of growth. It would do a person well to know cooties cease to exist after the 2nd grade.</p>
<p>We only burden ourselves by knowing too little, not by knowing too much. The most well-known geniuses we know are Leonardo da Vinci, Issac Newton, and Albert Einstein and all of them are burned into our memories because they stood on the shoulders of giants – the men who came before them who passed on their knowledge to them through books, literature, and the arts – to cultivate new knowledge for our own so that we may know them now. But whatever we come to know it is a benefit for us because even it is a terrible truth, it is enlightening and most of all, valuable whether we or people centuries from now know how to better use it.</p>