Category Archives: 3.1 Teaching & Learning

Plato’s Allegory of The Cave

Leave a reply

What is reality? This is a question that Plato explored in his book, The Republic, by examining concepts such as truth and justice.

In his short story, he imagined a group of people born in the darkness of a cave, chained and facing away from the entrance with only reflections and noises made from people passing by outside the cave as their experience. They had no knowledge of the outside world. For them, the cave was their reality.

However, one day one of the people escape and set foot outside the cave. For the first time in his life he sees the outside world and is exposed to the true reality of life outside his own. It takes some time for him to adjust – to the revelation / enlightenment – because he can only understand what he has previously experienced. Driven by this new reality however, he tries to convince the rest of the chained people within the cave of what he has seen, but they don’t believe him. The people in the cave have had an intrinsic education which has formed the basis for their understanding of the world.

The cave leads to many fundamental questions such as: What is the origin of knowledge? What are the problems of representation? What is the nature of reality itself?

Plato believed that education was the answer to these questions and the key to living a true and just life. He further believed that because of this, education should be provided by the state, something which the Curriculum for Excellence is centred upon; this idea of citizenship and creating well rounded people who are just. Through education it can be ensured that children become conditioned to the values that are accepted, in Plato’s view.

And so the story provides a clear explanation of the difference between experience and reality. It shows that the experience of reality is conditioned on the experience of life. So in simple terms, the way you live your life is your reality.

This highlights the importance for teachers to allow children to explore and learn from experiences by exposing them to new ones, and pushing them out of their comfort zones and into the world of the unknown.

We don’t learn, we remember…

Leave a reply

I think it’s fair to say that the recent inputs from John on the philosophy of education have left me feeling a little bit confused. However, that being said, I feel I now have a very basic understanding of some of the key theories concerning the ways in which we learn and how these can be used to improve the ways in which we teach.

The Greek philosopher, Plato, believed that we don’t learn, we remember. This is because he believed that the inner part of us – known as the soul – doesn’t change and is immortal in the sense that it has been reborn, time and again. Because of this, it has seen things in both the ‘material’ world and the ‘real’ world.

Our world, the ‘material’ world, is constantly changing and we rely on our senses to understand what’s going on. The ‘real’ world is outside of this realm and is unchanging and eternal. We understand this world not with our senses but instead with our mind.

The soul is said however, to be captivated by the workings of the body (i.e. our senses) and so we struggle to see past the illusion of our current world. Plato argued that in order to realise the ultimate reality of nature, we need to think independently of our senses, as the ‘material’ world is simply a shadow of the ‘real’ world of forms.

Plato belieapples-3-different-color-in-a-rowved that all things have a true being, a concept he explained in his Theory of the Forms.

Take apples for example:

  • What do they have in common?
  • What makes them distinctly ‘apple’?
  • What gives them their ‘appleness’?

Plato stated that there was only one form– or essence – of ‘appleness’ and that this forms the many. The form itself is unchanging and perfect (because it is from the ‘real’ world), but the apples (from the ‘material’ world) are simply an appearance of the form, which explains why they change and are imperfect.

We recognise these forms because we have a faint memory of them from our prior existence. It is this process of remembering the true reality of our world that allows us to learn, and therefore know that an apple is an apple, along with every other thing we interact with.

I think this is a really interesting concept and perhaps quite important in terms of our approach to teaching. This idea that we all have the prior knowledge there ready and waiting to be unlocked highlights the need for us as teachers to be willing to persevere with those kids who might be struggling. We need to help them rediscover what they already know.