How would you feel if you had access to all of the knowledge in the entire world? What if you had knowledge in every language or subject, anything you wanted?

Is this a good thing? Or instead, will it propel one to become an evil genius? Can knowledge make the world a better place?

Although I understand that there are some people who don't want this to be, I'm going to argue that yes - having knowledge available to all will make the world a better place.

If you are living a comfortable life and unaware of the sufferings of those around you, it makes you a less sympathetic person and allows the world's problems to continue. Of course, you will never be able to come at it from the perspective of an entirely different person, but you can come closer to understanding the world's problems and people's problems.

Like everything, universal knowledge can be used for harm. There are some people who will use it to their own advantage, but there is an even higher probability that it will be used for good - such as by helping students who are too poor to access resources used for finding treasures in the troves of history, philosophy, and culture. It can be used for people in the medical field to discover new cures and theorize about new solutions to solve today's medical problems.

However, let's not allow the fear of what may happen to overtake us by considering that universal knowledge could stop all the good that could happen. In fact, the world could become worse a lot faster with ignorance than it could with knowledge.

Knowledge empowers people to make change and shows what has gone wrong in the past and how to avoid it. Knowledge teaches people to love those they can't understand, from places they know little about. Knowledge teaches people to imagine the world and imagine people who are from very different backgrounds than themselves. This knowledge will enable them to meet people from those backgrounds.

I do understand there are confidential government security documents; this is a different story.

The knowledge I'm talking about is languages, films, the arts, history, science, and others like those. Let's enjoy and learn from them all. More harm is done from ignorance than from knowledge. Through knowledge, we can actually defeat those who want to use knowledge for evil.

Knowledge in and of itself is a neutral tool; people are able to use it however they choose. It has been proven that ignorance leads to harm or at least leads to people causing harm without knowing.

I am a firm supporter that academic knowledge should be available to all and should never be kept in the hands of an elite. By doing this, we start to create an oligarchy. Oligarchies keep a majority of people in the dark and have led to corruption throughout history.

If knowledge is free to all, we would be able to broaden our dreams as we are making the world a better place for ourselves and for others. We will become more enlightened by the understanding of other humans. This is the best part of academic knowledge because it reveals to us new worlds that we may not have been able to see outside our circle of friends. Knowledge enables us to become like eagles, soaring higher with our wings of education to see the world below that we wouldn't have known if we stayed in our comfortable nest of the known.