Metaphor In Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” (Aristotle) In Plato’s “Allegory of the cave,” a group of men who have been held in a cave for the entirety of their lives are used a sustained metaphor tho show how society learns new things. Plato goes about this by having one man escape from the cave and experience the world while the rest of the prisoners are still in the cave. When the man who escaped returns to tell the others about the outside, the men he is held with don’t believe him. Plato uses this metaphor to show that in order to believe something a person will have to “see it to believe it.” While in “Learning by Doing” by Jonny Moye, William Dugger, and Kendall Stark-Weather, the authors

focus on the idea of “learning by doing” in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) courses. The authors discuss the importance of learning by doing in STEM courses in order to produce students that have an in-depth understanding to why certain laws and theorem work in practice. Moye, Dugger, and Stark-Weather would today’s learners require more hands on experience compared to students during the time period the “Allegory of the cave was written”
The development the key technology of the past would have impossible with out people both being able to see the outcome of the technology and take advantage of the outcome as well. For example, in Moye, Dugger, and Stark-Weather’s essay they say that “Development of these technologies required knowledge as well as the application
of that knowledge. As was true in ancient times, knowledge and the ability to use that knowledge (to do) remains essential for survival of the human race.”(“learning by doing’ research introduction”, 24) In Plato’s essay he argues a very similar point, saying “Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if anyone tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.” (147) In this excerpt, Plato is arguing that if the man where to reenter the cave and tell the other prisoners that the other men would not believe the heresy that the escaped man was telling them and prisoners would most likely kill him. This idea can be applied to the technologies of the past because if someone was just told of something profound they would not believe what they are hearing and call them a heretic, while if someone experiences something they are more likely to believe it.
There are multiple real life examples of this, but one of the most profound examples of someone discovering something incredible and then being called a heretic for it is when Galileo Galilei disproved the geocentric model (Earth as the center of the solar system) and creating the heliocentric model (the Sun as the center of the solar system).

When Galileo went to present his findings to the Church they forced him to recant his findings and was then forced to live his life under house arrest. This example shows how Moye, Dugger, and Stark-Weather’s idea hold true, when a group of people are told something that is potentially earth-shattering people will shy away and not believe it, but when they are shown and experience something they will believe it. Therefore, in this case, Plato’s theory does not hold true because he would have said that people would have believed Galileo because they where shown his discoveries, this suggests that people became less excepting of information sometime before seventeenth

century.
Moye, Dugger, and Stark-Weather argue that there needs to be more doing in high school by saying “This study reveals that teachers feel that students benefit from doing activities to support learning and if they were given the time and resources, those teachers would assign their students more projects to do in class.

Of course, time and resources are very limited.” (“Is ‘learning by doing’ Important?”,27) This statement by Moye, Dugger, and Stark-Weather is both similar and different to what plato believes. It is similar because both students today and students in ancient Greece learn by seeing something; however, today’s students seem to require actually experiencing the idea in order to fully understand the idea or topic. The need for this extra step in the education process is perplexing; does this suggest that modern students are becoming difficult to teach? What can be learned for this difference that Moye, Dugger, and Stark-Weather’s discoveries and that of Plato is that student today are not necessarily harder to teach, but expected to know more. Students today are expected to be proficient in science, math, english, history, and humanity course at the same time, this is were the addition of the extra step in the learn process is required. In order for a student be proficient in all of the above courses a teach must incorporate doing activities into their lesson plans so students can absorb all of the material that they are exposed to over a given day. The need for

doing activities could possibly be avoided if students did not have to be well versed in all areas of study. In sort, the key difference between Moye, Dugger, and Stark-Weather’s ideas and Plato’s ideas is not students require more education on one topic because they are not keen learners its that students require more education on one topic because they are required to know so much more than just a single topic.
One of the only holes that can be found in both Plato’s and Moye, Dugger, and Stark-Weather’s argument is one of religion. Today, the vast majority of the american population identifies with a religion of some sort, and all of the major religions begin thousands of years ago so there is most defiantly not a person alive today that witness any of the greatness described in each religions’ holy book. This is where the the hole lies in each a papers argument, since both papers argue that seeing is believing and Moye, Dugger, and Stark-Weather take it a level further that a person need to also experience something in order to gain a better understanding of the topic. Since no one who experienced the any of the miracles described by each of the major religions are alive. why do they have so many followers? This seams to go against what Plato and Moye, Dugger, and Stark-Weather are arguing, yet it is true that the majority of the population believe in something that they have never witness or much less took part it. This whole idea that millions of people believe in something they have never witnessed seems very ironic. Since the church rejected something that they witnessed with Galileo’s heliocentric model, when their whole belief system is something that they have never witnessed or taken part in, and in order to learn something you must believe it exists.
This is where learning by doing becomes relevant, because it allows students to see why something works and thus believe it exists. In turn allows the student to learn the topic and truly understand how to apply and used the topic at hand in real life and be successful with it.