"Wisest is she who knows she does not know" - John Cho

I think the statement suggests that people start to lose interest in life and its mechanism due to the continuous encounters with events and other factors which takes place around them today. These encounters can be anything which will affect the person individually. From my own experiences, I more or less agree with this statement. Nowadays, adults as well as teenagers don't have the time to think of these philosophical questions like Sophie does. They have to meet deadlines and this would mean they would have to be completely focused in order to meet it and not face punishment. Meanwhile, a child would have much more imagination and would wonder about the many new things which he encounters.

The child may not necessarily not link his imagination with the mechanism of the world however once he gets to a certain level of knowledge then he will start to imply his observations with this idea. One recent experience which I can link with the past was when I walked by a beggar with no legs. When I was much younger I used to feel that these beggars with no legs were cheating on pedestrians by hiding their legs inside a bag or drilling a hole in the ground and sticking their legs inside to make the pedestrians feel sympathetic. This was mainly due to the fact that my parents always told me not to give money to beggars especially at a young age or else they might follow and keep asking for money. This idea seems incredibly ridiculous at this moment after learning about the human body in school but how different would it be if I wasn't taught anything about the body's mechanism and still didn't have answers to the ideas of legless beggars?

The book, 'Sophie's World', was published in 1991 so any facts in the book would have came from information before that year. Gaardner may have not thought of this statement if she wrote the same book today because of how an average person's life is like today compared to a person's life in 1991. Nowadays, many infants (2 years old and older) are being forced into so much pressure from parents who seem to be feel that learning from a much younger age will make the child a smarter adult in the future. This means the infant would not necessarily lose their ability to 'wonder about the world' but would still be forced into some much pressure at such a young age that they would be so accustomed to it and not do anything else.

Overall, I agree with that fact that people are caring less about the world and its mechanism but aren't necessarily losing their ability to. It is just the pressure from their peers and other factors which prevents them to have any time to wonder.