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The role of a teacher
Techniques of reality used within platos allegory of the cave
Teacher and student relationship
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The Plato’s Allegory of the Cave The Plato’s Allegory of the Cave written by Plato is a dialogue between Plato’s brother Glaucon and Plato’s mentor Socrates. In the story, Plato presents a prisoner chained to the ground within a cave, and is facing a wall with animated puppets, which are the shadows cast by a light source from behind. The prisoner knows that other people are in the cave as well. For the prisoner, this is the reality of the world. Then one day, people come to the cave, and the prisoner is taking out from the cave with his chains removed. When the prisoner returns to the cave to inform the other prisoners of his discovery of the real world, the other prisoners do not believe him and decide to kill him if he tries to set them …show more content…
The irrational concept of the education has been influenced moral principles concerning what is good for a society as well as for an individual; however, the understanding of the intrinsic nature of the education removes the darkness of beliefs, which Plato calls prisoners’ shadows in his writing The Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, a dialogue between Glaucon and Socrates. Although “The Plato’s Allegory of the Cave” was written thousands of years ago, Plato’s depiction of the true education is a wakeup call for our humanity to admit the acquisition of knowledge with circumspection. The truth often relies on a mistaking understanding of sight or shadow according to Plato; the truth regularly relies on prejudice which makes an individual a prisoner, and the discovery of new truth often encounters hostility. A close analysis of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave allows us to view the education as not a way to transfer knowledge, but a way to transform …show more content…
In our education system, a professor will be given lecture for hours to hundreds of students in some large universities with expectation to increase their knowledge. At the end of the day, some of them will drop, some will finish their major with a low GPA, and others will graduate with a good grade, but a few knowledges remain in their memories. As a matter of fact, some people can be holding their PhD without be able to help their children at home with a basic homework in physics. The education system teaches them how to learn. Nowadays, we even have classes to learn how to learn strategies; as a result, our students become often as product “prisoners” of our education system because in the education system that transfer knowledge, students learn to a score good grade. If we assume that students who work just for grade are prisoners in Plato’s metaphor, their teachers and parents are prisoners as well. In the school system, some teachers don’t have any love for their career or for their students; therefore, students are going to dislike the study and work just for passing grade because of lack of dialogue between students and teachers. This issue is well emphasis when “The underlying assumption of dialogue is that knowledge is not a finished product, but is rather shaped in praxis out of a context-dependent partnership
What is reality? An enduring question, philosophers have struggled to identify its definition and basic concept since the beginning of time. Plato, in his provocative essay, The Cave, used symbols and images to ridicule and explain how humanity easily justifies their current reality while showing us that true wisdom and enlightenment lies outside this fabricated version of reality. If he were alive in modern times, he would find society unchanged; still uneducated and silently trapped in our own hallucination of reality with only the glimmer of educational paths available. While this may be a bleak comparison, it is an accurate one as the media influences of today present a contrasting picture of education and ignorance that keeps us trapped
Portraying the prisoners inside the cave for a lifetime further describes his beliefs on how closed minded society is in his opinion. The “light outside the cave” explains how he feels knowledge is the source of light to everyone’s lives. Without knowledge, there is lack of light. Also, since society does not want to gain further knowledge, they will seem to stay stuck in the dark tunnel. Plato also uses personification to give reader insight on how someone may treat the earth and appreciate it. For example, Plato states “Clearly, he said, he would first see the sun and then reason about him.” The reasoning behind this is to explain how a man would reason with the sun as if it were an actual speaking person. The style of Plato’s writing gives readers an understanding on why his work is named “Allegory of the Cave”. The use of his rhetorical devices give deeper meanings to the Earth and the nature it
In their work, Plato and Paulo Freire have offered harsh critiques of education and learning. Plato compares people to prisoners in a cave of darkness in relation to knowledge, and Freire refers to a “Banking Concept” of education in which teachers put their thoughts and information into students’ minds much like the deposition of money into a bank. Instead of this money being of value, Freire and Plato acknowledge that the value declines. Although many people refute the concept of accepting new knowledge and admission of mistakes, I claim that both Plato and Freire produce valid points about the corruption of education because people cannot learn unless they have an open mind and truly desire to learn. Ultimately, what is at stake here is the effectiveness of learning and continuing the cycle of education.
In Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave,” he suggests that there are two different forms of vision, a “mind’s eye” and a “bodily eye.” The “bodily eye” is a metaphor for the senses. While inside the cave, the prisoners function only with this eye. The “mind’s eye” is a higher level of thinking, and is mobilized only when the prisoner is released into the outside world. This eye does not exist within the cave; it only exists in the real, perfect world.
The main concept behind Plato’s Allegory of the cave is to show how individuals perceive the world due to factors such as education. Throughout the video, Plato’s main consensus is strictly focused on the changes that an individual experiences after he or she is exposed to the philosophical reasoning behind a situation, rather than mere interpretations. This can be seen in the opening and middle portions of the video. The video starts with all three prisoners being tied up looking in a dark cave, simply seeing shadows and hearing echoes of ongoing events that are happening outside the cave. At this point, all three prisoner are completely naive to to what is happening, and they believe everything that they are told, because they have no reason to doubt the truth behind
Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” is a story being told by Socrates to Plato’s brother, Glaucon. Socrates tells of prisoners in an underground cave who are made to look upon the front wall of the cave. To the rear of the prisoners, below the protection of the parapet, lie the puppeteers whom are casting the shadows on the wall in that the prisoners are perceiving reality. Once a prisoner is free, he's forced to look upon the fire and objects that once determined his perception of reality, and he so realizes these new pictures before of him are now the accepted forms of reality. Plato describes the vision of the real truth to be "aching" to the eyes of the prisoners, and the way they might naturally be inclined to going back and viewing what they need perpetually seen as a pleasing and painless acceptance of truth. This stage of thinking is noted as "belief."
Freedom in mind, freedom in nature, and freedom in subjectivity of individual are three kinds of freedoms. However, freedom should be expressed within the limits of reason and morality. Having freedom equals having the power to think, to speak, and to act without externally imposed restrains. As a matter of fact, finding freedom in order to live free is the common idea in Plato with "The Allegory of the Cave"; Henry David Thoreau with " Where I lived and What I lived for"; and Jean Paul Sartre with " Existentialism". Generally, Plato, Thoreau, and Sartre suggested that human life should be free. They differ in what that freedom is. Plato thinks it is found in the world of intellect, Thoreau thinks freedom is found in nature, and Sartre thinks freedom is found in subjectivity of individual.
We may think that we come up we ideas and theories because is something that happened in our mind and that nobody had to do something with it but all our surround environment influence us in how we take decision, in what we believe and much more. Philosophers had been influence throughout their life by other people in order to come up with their works. The philosophical work of some of the great philosophers of all time such as Plato, Marx, Freud and Carnegie were also influenced by the environment in which they were living. In the “Allegory of the Cave”, Plato was influenced by several events that happened in his life that lead to him writing this essay in a way to express his feeling on what society do to people that can show them reality.
The allegory of the cave is one of Plato’s many theories, probably one of his most known theories as well. This theory is based on the human perception. Plato would say that the knowledge gained through the senses is no more than your opinion but in order to have actual knowledge you have to obtain it through philosophical reasoning. In his theory, he separates people who think that their sensory knowledge it the truth and people who really see the truth.
Imagine a group of people, prisoners, who had been chained to stare at a wall in a cave for all of their lives. Facing that wall, these prisoners can pass the time by merely watching the shadows casted from a fire they could not see behind them dance on the walls. These shadows became the closest to what view of reality the prisoners have. But what happens after one of these prisoners is unbound from his chains to inspect beyond the wall of shadows, to the fire and outside the cave? How would seeing the world outside of the walls of the cave affect his views of the shadows and reality? It is this theme with its questions that make up Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. It is in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave that there are several key ideas presented in the allegory. The ideas presented in the allegory can be related back to themes of education and the gaining of knowledge and in ways that can relate back to “us”, the people.
...onclusion, the considerations of knowledge and reality are ones that philosophers will continue to contemplate throughout the centuries. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” is a wonderful attempt at trying to ascertain the answers to these inquiries with its revealing comparisons that contrast the darkness of ignorance and the light of the sun to knowledge to demonstrate an individual’s journey up and out of the cave to the immaterial world of heaven and a state of true enlightenment. The allegory also illustrates Plato’s ideal of dualism by liberating knowledge from any dependency on anything material or physical. This excursion into Plato’s teachings illuminated the “Allegory of the Cave” in detail, and affirmed the question that dualism does, undeniably, exist and that Plato is correct in his ideal that reality does, without a doubt, go beyond the material world.
Do we really understand the world we live in and see everyday? Is our everyday perception of reality a misinterpretation, which somehow we can’t break free from? A famous Greek philosopher by the name of Plato sought out to explain this in an experiment he called the Cave Allegory. I will discuss what the Cave Allegory is as well as talk about the movie Interstellar, which is a great example of Plato’s Cave Allegory and how it relates to Plato’s ideas. The question we have to answer first is, what is Plato’s Cave Allegory?
In the story “Allegory Of The Cave” it shows a life lesson on how individuals can act stubborn in the world because they are not educated or aware of certain artifacts. In this essay i will give you examples of how real life situations relate to the story “Allegory Of The Cave”. In Plato’s story “Allegory Of the Cave” there are a group of prisoners that have been chained in a dark cave their whole life not being able to turn back at all. The only contact they have with the outside world is seeing the shadows of the things that pass behind them. Then one prisoner becomes free and is able to explore the outside world. When the freed prisoner steps outside for the first time in his life the beaming sun blinds him but then gets used to the sun
In the story of "Allegory of the Cave", Plato illustrates his concerning on humanity and education. By the meaning of "Allegory of the Cave", we understand the effect of education on us. Most of the people ignore the importance of teaching, and they seek to learn the knowledge of the book or other materials. Therefore, they don 't care the truth or ignore it, which leads the truth far from us. "Indeed, the very principle that education ought to be more concerned with drawing out various human potentials than with only depositing information into students owes its origin to Plato" (Burch 7). To improve people 's educational level, we should realize that what
Plato, a student of Socrates, in his book “The Republic” wrote an allegory known as “Plato's Cave”. In Plato's allegory humans are trapped within a dark cave where they can only catch glimpses of the world above through shadows on the wall.2 Plato is describing how the typical human is. They have little knowledge and what they think they know has very little basis in fact. He describes these people as prisoners, in his allegory, and they are only free when they gain knowledge of the world above the cave.