Allegory of the Cave

Considering the different roles people are playing in the story, there are two types of people who could be described as “students” and “teachers”. Students roles are to absorb as match information as possible, and the teachers’ role is to make sure they truly understand each detail. Being student does not mean that you must educate yourself with books, you might learn how to plant seeds, or learn how to swim. It does not matter how old are you, as long as you are trying out new things (learning something new) and learning something to make your life easier, you become student. Educate (teach) people is hardest thing to do. Every person has different thoughts and they differently understand everything. For some people it is harder to learn something so, that people need different threat and different way to educate them which makes teaching so hard. In the case of “Allegory of the cave”, prisoners which was living in the cave his whole life and was only able to see the shadows of the object behind, was freed and got the opportunity to discover the world. After decades of being in the cave he got chance to learn about outside world and he did not get scared. It was very hard in the beginning and then he got used to it and achieved his goal. In this situation that prisoner was both: “student” and “teacher”. He did not have anyone to help him understand outside world, he had to do it by himself. He educated himself by experimenting.

I will go further and explain some metaphors that Pluto use to describe education and knowledge. The first metaphor is shadows. In story they explain that prisoners see the shadows of the objects behind them. Shadow explains that how people are looking at the information and see only the surface, and they call it different kind of things. But there are people who are willing to go further and understand every single part of information and see what it actually is (of course it’s my opinion). Second and biggest metaphor is prisoners. Prisoners are actually people which have never or never wanted to learn something new. They are people which need education and they don’t know that they do. Those metaphors are very important for education and knowledge. Every single person should truly understand that when they will try to educate themselves it will be hard in the beginning, but later on they will find out how beautiful learning something new is, and how good it feels to accomplish something. Every person should understand everything deeply so the won’t be in the prisoners (people which are uneducated and are not trying to learn something new) place.