Consider the following comments on wonder.
Wisdom begins in wonder.
Socrates
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
Albert Einstein
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Oscar Wilde
The child's wonder is just ignorance we have not yet explained away.
To explain a thing is sometimes to stop seeing it, and to understand the rainbow is to lose it.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis is that wonder is not a childish stage we outgrow but a way of seeing that adulthood tends to bury under explanation and routine. Open with a remembered moment of wonder, a night sky, a first ocean, a question that opened rather than closed. Then explore the tension between wonder and knowledge: understanding can deepen our awe, yet it can also flatten the world into the merely explained and familiar. A useful structural move asks whether wonder fades because the world becomes smaller or because we stop paying attention to it. Caution: avoid the easy nostalgia that treats all knowledge as the enemy of wonder, since the scientist who knows what a star is can be more astonished by it, not less.