Neo France A.

Garcia
BROAD2A

"A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again."

In the context of universal or even global knowledge, any amount of knowledge is only a small amount
of knowledge. However, the idea that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing is that one should never
assume that one knows something completely. It is always best to test your knowledge before putting it
into practice. The danger is that if you know a little and think you know a lot more, you may not get the
results you expected. This can apply to human relationships and not just things that are physically
dangerous. For example, you may think that you know a person well just because they told you some
intimate details about their life at some point. On this basis, you have the right and the duty to teach
that person about various aspects of life on a daily basis. But that cannot be true. And then it may
happen that you lose a good friendship instead of letting it develop.

A little knowledge has nothing to do with specialization. It has to do with making assumptions without
much real evidence to support those assumptions. Sometimes these assumptions are based on emotion.
For example, I can learn to name each and every different bone and muscle in the human body. Then I
can think that I am ready to have surgery. It's just the thrill of learning something new and taking that
knowledge to a higher level than I'm ready for. However, sometimes the assumption is based on
arrogance. For example, many people still believe today that they are superior to others due to different
skin colors. This is sheer arrogance, although they may have anecdotal evidence to back up their claim.

In relation to this, the teaching of Saint-Exupéry that in order for us to have a spiritual growth we must
be able to discover the things that we haven’t experienced yet. When we explore, we get to see the
beauty of the things around us. Sometimes we find the true beauty in places where we think that is not
possible to be in.