Liberal Arts Education In Plato's The Allegory Of The Cave

The basic purpose of college is education. The author refers to Thomas Jefferson’s “The basis of our government is the opinion of the people.” to emphasize how educated citizenry affects the government, and then indicates the importance of the college. For using the importance of critical thinking to argue his thesis, he states the current situation of the general people, who are exposed with “pleadings and persuasions” every day and need to “tell the difference between demagoguery and responsible arguments.” (Delbanco 507) As a person living in the current world, it is really deceptive to tell true or false. Therefore, the ability of critical thinking is so important to master and then college still matters as it can train people critically thinking. Then, for the free thinking, he mentions the book Education’s End of Kronman, the former Yale dean, which includes, “the ideals of individual freedom and toleration,” “a reliance on markets as a mechanism for the organization of economic life,” and “an acceptance of the truths of modern science.” The author uses good “ethos” of other person with authoritative support to demonstrate the significance of free thinking. As our world is multicultural and everyone is unique, every certain person should accept others’ culture and concepts with free thinking. For the last part, endless thinking, how does the author take advantages of this? “One of the marks of an educated person is the recognition that it can never be adequately done and is therefore all the more worth doing.” (Delbanco 508) As a student in the college, I am convinced in this point. An educated person will be never fulfill with the knowledge he gets so far, so we have educated since the youth, how can we stop learning and vanish one of our nature – curiosity, which

The Allegory of the Cave, also know as The Analogy of the Cave, Plato's Cave or Parable of the Cave is presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work “The Republic “ as a theory concerning the perceptions of human kind and compares the effects of education to the lack of education on our observations. The passage is written as dialogue between Plato’s brother Glaucon and his teacher Socrates.

In the ‘The Allegory of the Cave’, Plato uses a philosophical situation to help us as the reader to examine our perception of life by what is around us. Plato uses such an abstract situation to show that we can mistake the information that we gain due to our position in a situation for truth.

Upon first exiting the cave we are blinded by the brightest of light, though we cannot recognize its origin, we know that it charts our course. Slowly we begin to notice at first little variations of light, mostly little color changes, as if we could not have possibly have taken it in all at once. This is the first realization of education; past truths are either put into perspective or proven false. Either way our mind is finally opening up to the ideas and images that have evaded us for so long. The ability to reason is building within us and we start to question all things past we knew to be true. The eyes start to see even more now and the pain has subsided. We are ravenous and cannot seem to get enough of our surroundings. The strangest thing starts to happen, it seems that the more knowledge we acquire the more questions that present themselves. The same could be said for education in two different ways. First, the more knowledge that we acquire, the more ability we seem to have for the future acquisition of knowledge. Its as if we are not limited by the container we use to store this information, on the contrary, we now have discovered that its depths are limitless. Secondly, the more knowledge we acquire, the more confidence we seem to find in regards to taking on bigger challenges and tasks.

Plato’s logical strategy in the allegory of the cave is of deductive reasoning. Plato uses a cave containing people bound by chains which constrict their neck and legs in such a way that they are unable to turn around and there is a fire roaring behind them casting shadows on the wall. Since the prisoners cannot turn their heads to see what is casting the shadow the only thing they can perceive are the shadows and the sounds that seem to becoming from them. This is what Plato argues in the allegory of the cave “To them, I said, the truth would literally be nothing but the shadows of the images.”(The Allegory of the Cave Plato). Since these prisoners know nothing outside of the cave they are ignorant of the “light” and are content on

While interpreting Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave’’ in which is a representation that described a narrative of the society of people in before Christ years. I realized how there was a major comparison of people in today’s society that reflected the same prisoner traits as the prisoners that were described in the dialogue. According to the Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” It described conditions of people chained at birth unable to function as independent individuals that were locked in a protracted dark cave. They were allowed to rotate their necks but could not stand up unless told to or leave the cave. Within this cave they could only watch a wall showing flash images and objects as if the prisoners were watching a play or movies at a theater. They believed that the pictures shown on the wall were factual in which they were just shadows of objects that were behind them. The objects reflected forms and puppet that were placed up by puppeteers to create shadows on the wall. The prisoners were unable to see the puppeteers and seemed as if they were watching a puppet show in the dark.

Broadly speaking, a liberal arts education is concerned with the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself, rather than for the sake of acquiring skills targeted at a career. The liberal arts philosophy is traced to the Greek philosopher Socrates, who famously proclaimed that the “unexamined life is not worth living”. To that end, traditional liberal arts education emphasizes the scholarly, the gentlemanly and the liberating. However, contemporary liberal arts education is marked by the integration of liberal and practical education. Consequently, a Christian liberal arts education should provide knowledge and intellectual skills to help students become functional and capable of

Prompt: Define Plato 's “Allegory of the Cave”. What is the central message? Is he describing education alone? Where does politics come in?

Plato’s “Allegory of The Cave” and Paulo Freire’s “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education” both contend that education is a process of freeing the chains of deception and false images that make us prisoners in the cave of ignorance. I agree with both Plato and Freire in saying that without education, like the prisoners, our perception of reality is distorted by our lack of knowledge.

"The Allegory of the Cave," by Plato, explains that people experience emotional and intellectual revelations throughout different stages in their lives. This excerpt, from his dialogue The Republic, is a conversation between a philosopher and his pupil. The argument made by this philosopher has been interpreted thousands of times across the world. My own interpretation of this allegory is simple enough as Plato expresses his thoughts as separate stages. The stages, very much like life, are represented by growing realizations and newfound "pains." Therefore, each stage in "The Allegory of the Cave" reveals the relation between the growth of the mind and age.

In Plato’s, “Allegory of the Cave”, a key theory I found was the importance of gaining knowledge. Plato uses an “allegory to illustrate the dilemma facing the psyche in the ascent to knowledge of the imperishable and unchanging forms” (Fiero, 104). Based on my research of the Republic, the allegory can reveal multiple hidden messages. Plato describes in the Allegory, ordinary mortals who are chained within an underground chamber, which according to Fiero, represents the psyche imprisoned within the human body. These mortals can’t look sideways, but rather only straight ahead. On top of this, they also can’t leave the cave. These prisoners are facing a cave wall that they can only see shadows reflecting from a fire of what they imagine are men. These mortals have been in this cave since childhood, which makes them believe the shadows themselves are the men, not a shadow of an actual man. Again, according to Fiero, the light, represents true knowledge, and the shadows on the walls of the cave represent the imperfect and perishable imitations of the forms that occupy the world of the senses.

It is near possible to earn the label of enlightenment.   In the eyes of Greek mythology, to qualify as enlightened, one must always go through a hero’s quest.   Within his or her quest, they return transformed with a new knowledge, or an elixir, that will forever change how they go on in the world.

The cave allegory also proves that the role of education is not to teach in the sense of feeding people information they do not have, but rather to shed light on things they already know. Education "isn't the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn't turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it properly." (2)

The “Allegory of the Cave” by Plato represents the differences in the way we perceive reality and what we believe is real. In his story, Plato starts by saying that in a cave, there are prisoners chained down and are forced to look at a wall. The prisoners are unable to turn their heads to see what is going on behind them and are completely bound to the floor. Behind the prisoners, puppeteers hide and cast shadows on the wall in line with the prisoners’ sight, thus giving the prisoners their only sense of reality. What happens in the passage is not told from the prisoners’ point of view but is actually a conversation held between Socrates and Glaucon (Plato’s brother).

“See human beings as though they were in an underground cave-like dwelling” (193). Although Plato’s famous allegory of the cave doesn’t appear until Book VII of The Republic, its significance cannot be understated. The meaning behind the Greek philosopher’s imagery manifests itself throughout the rest of the work, specifically Book I. After outlining the description of the cave and demonstrating how the rest of The Republic dramatizes it, I argue that Plato (or Plato’s Socrates) is revealing a relationship that posits philosophy, which can only come about through mutual respect, as critical for the city’s well-being, but ultimately not enough just by itself.