“All Things Good to Know Are Difficult to Learn” … But, Maybe Not.

According to an ancient Greek proverb, “All things good to know are difficult to learn.” This statement, in my opinion, is utterly ridiculous. At first glance, at least to me, it seems like a reasonable concept to grasp; however, the more I think about this phrase, the more it does not sit right with me. The proverb is oddly vague and nonspecific, and I feel like it does not cover a full concept, but rather that it needs continuation. There are multiple problems I have with this phrase, most of which include its oversimplification of the problem (the problem being people who do not put in effort to learn “important” information).

This directly leads into what I believe to be the first oversimplification: “all things good to know” is a relative term, meaning each individual first gets to decide what information is important for him or her to know. The phrase “good to know” is one which is spoken by millions of people whenever they are told a useless fact, whether out of sarcasm or sincerity. The point still stands that these facts are “good to know.” That’s just one example, but another would be to look at the specific dreams, goals, and aspirations of certain individuals. If an individual is passionate about being a doctor, their information that is “good to know” is vastly different from, say, a janitor’s information.

This relativity then leads into the second point I find to be an oversimplification: the relative information that each individual finds “good to know” then changes the difficulty of how it is to be learned. Looking at the latter example in the idea prior to this one, a doctor would have a much more difficult time learning “good to know” information than a janitor would. On a similar note, but regarding students instead, the information a teacher finds to be “good to know” rarely corresponds with that which the students are truly interested in learning.

This lack of interest brings up a completely different question: if there is no interest, is the information really “good to know” in that situation? Rather, what really makes information good to know? This enigma is part of why my point earlier about relativity makes sense. The learning process– and the difficulty of such– cannot be determined until there is a common answer to the questions previously brought up. So long as people are interested in different aspects of life– “things” as said in the proverb– the information that is “good to know” can only be relative based on each individual’s thoughts, ideas, and opinions.

Even if we do find this common ground, I do not feel that there has ever been– or will ever be– a connection between importance and difficulty. Math, a class which most all schools place emphasis on the importance of, is very difficult for some; for others, math is exciting, simple, or even fun. This concept makes it very clear to see the relativity that clouds over the truth of the proverb “All things good to know are difficult to learn.” While we all may need to learn certain bits of “good to know” information, the learning process (which I did not go into depth about) is different for every individual; as a society made up of billions of different people– each of whom has a different idea of “good to know” information– it is ludicrous to claim that the difficulty of the learning process has any connection to how “good to know” the information is.