This is the stuff of The Matrix or The Truman Show. Hollywood loves it and so do high school students. The idea is as old as the word ‘idea’ itself. 400 years before Christ, Plato accounted for this sense of another reality in his ‘Allegory of the Cave’. According to this view on reality, we are prisoners in a cave, looking at the shadows of puppets on the cave wall. That is to say everything we see around us is just a illusion. We may think we see trees and cats and BMWs, but in fact they are only shadows, projected by the light of a fire and some fancy puppeteers. Outside the cave are the true trees and cats and BMWs, or the pure ‘idea’ of these, which would hurt our eyes to look at.
Whether or not we should believe in this allegory is impossible to determine, but it does supply us with an interesting thought tool for looking at school. Have you ever felt like school is a cave? The students are the prisoners. The teachers (or puppeteers) project their lessons up on the blackboard, giving their version of the ‘truth’. And what is the fire they use to make students believe, or perhaps pay attention in class for that matter? Is it their charisma? Is it the notion of getting grades? And what about that exit door that leads to the light? Is that graduation? Is that what teachers are referring to when they tell students about life in ‘the real world’?Is this allegory of the cave a fair analogy for school? Is school a cave?
16 comments:
I think that Plato's cave analogy is definitely very close to what the atmosphere of school is. There are many elements of school that are preparing all of us for life independent of our parents, where we have to learn to fend for ourselves. In fact, more than just school could be considered a cave, our entire childhood, up until graduation, could be considered living in a sheltered environment. It is a sheltered environment, but we are also trapped inside, like prisoners in the cave, until we reach a certain age. The elements of school that prepare us for life outside the cave: Interacting with other people. In school it is with classmates, outside the cave it is with co-workers or neighbours. Obeying orders from superiors. You have to do what the teachers say, or suffer consequences, and in the real world, disobey your boss or break the law, and you can lose your job or go to jail. You have to hand in work on time in school. Miss paying bills in the real world, and you’ll go into debt. The list goes on, and anyone can see that school (whether or not that is its primary purpose) is purely an immense training course for life outside the cave.
Are we completely sure that what our "teachers" are teaching us is true, or relevant to our lives? The projected lessons on the blackboard is just a curriculum they receive from the principal (warden) which in turn he/she receives from a higher entity. What is it that this curriculum wants to show us? What are the morals and what is the agenda of those(puppeteers) who create the curriculum? The education system, from grade school through college and post grad, is re-envisioned through an economic lens. Where is the love, respect, and happiness so essential to human societies? Everything is about our future jobs/professions, "they" make you think that if you drop out, you do not have a chance to advance in life. That is why we pay attention in class. We are afraid of this "exit door". Us children are inculcated into this industrialized, atomized mind set. Does the real world inspire rather than suppress, or are those just the schools? I do believe we are just prisoners looking at fun, useless BMW images on the wall projected by a small group or puppeteers in a cave. I'm happy though, because I have it all. I have a stereo that is very decent, a shirt that is getting very respectable. I am close to being complete, to graduation.
Plato's mith of the cavern is a very smart analogy of what we think "reality" is, but I don't think that the school is comparable to the cave, because, in the mith, the cave it's the prison where ignorant people live in. For Plato, the one that goes outside the cave is the wise one, the philosopher, and his purpose is to come back and tell the other people what's outside the cave: THAT is, in my opinion, the role of the school. School is teaching us an idea, a vague idea, of what the world is like, and that should give us the will and the curiosity to break free from the chains of ignorance and go outside in the real world to see for ourselves and look for the knowledge. School is something dynamical, a place where a costant exchange of opinions take place, and that's why it cannot be considered a cave, where everything is dark and fixed. The importance of the role of school does not rely on the things it's teaching, that may be as well true or false or incomplete, but on its purpose of making people interested in what happens around them, of going outside their little world, and being prepared to explore and investigate everything that surrounds them. Plato also said that it may be that we are not ready yet to face the outside world, because the truth is sometimes too incomprehensible for our minds: our role is to find our truth, our answers between the shadows and the lights. As socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living.
When being born into a society, we aren’t thrown into a world void of a system. Bureaucratic intricacies even follow us up within our genesis, wanting to know things such as our name, weight, and time of birth. Without consent, being born anywhere in the world is an initiation into that society, wherever it may be, so even from birth we are categorised into some style of formation that we are expected to abide by, that is just social etiquette. The choice to abide by your peoples’ system is normally not of free will and has consequences if you choose not to do so enforced by an authority figure. So already from the day we are born, we have a pre-set cave imposed upon us. The argument of whether school is enlightenment or indoctrination is neither here or there, point being that it is yet another system devised by people thought to be ‘educated’ and ‘responsible’ enough to create something for children to learn from. Through all these systems and laws to abide to, we push ourselves as a human race further into a cave and become less aware of where everything in our everyday life comes from, just over two thousand years and we’ve already created a cave that consumes the whole world. Within school we are educated from what others want us to know but are rarely informed about the system itself, where this information comes from, we are always told not ask questions but we are never told the way in which it works leaving us walking deeper and deeper inside these caves...
School isn’t necessarily a cave as such, but a way to instill fear of authority into children, prevent them from questioning information and to all think alike. I’m sure most teachers will agree that the best student is one that just sits quietly, absorbing and accepting everything that is told to them as opposed to one who constantly asks ‘Why?’ and won’t accept things told to them .
The people in power do not want people who think for themselves. They want drones who don’t question anything, no matter how unjust. The truth is that school is the entrance to the cave. Then we are sat down in front of the wall and expected to stay there.
This doesn’t mean that we should reject everything we are told in school. Biologically, humans learn from example by authoritative figures like parents and teachers. Teachers do their best to teach the current human understanding of the world as best they can. (I say ‘current’ because new discoveries are made all the time.) That is important for ourselves and our understanding of the world. If we were to look too deeply into our lifestyles and our artificial existence, we would go mad if we were lucky. Others look for alternative explanations to our lives often ending in horror. (A few examples are David Koresh, Jim Jones, Charles Manson and Marshall Applewhite.)
We are who we are and should embrace that, but with an open mind, good judgment and the ability to question authority.
If Plato's theory is correct, we all got the same illusion. So mankind created one big illusion, which we keep up to date by study. From the moment your born, you're learning. Does anyone remember what you saw en thought when you were a baby? So maybe the shadows are there, but our environment gives us no chance to develop your own illusion.
The original meaning of the word school is 'free space'. Why do we use this word for something that might be a cave? Maybe a cave is a free space, then school would be a free space, and the students are not the prisoners. We are free to believe whatever we want. So if the teachers teach us their vision of the truth, it's still our own choice whether we believe it or not. We learned that school teaches us the truth, so we just reckless believe that everything what we're taught in school IS true. If you believe that teachers give us their truth, not THE real truth, then why do you go to school? Why don't you find out yourself? Because we need the teachers truth to be part of the civilization, to survive in the mankind created illusion. The truth that teachers teach us is not totally their truth, they give us the truth that they learned + his or her own experiences. So THE illusion changes all the time, because of own experiences. Something that you never saw before might be a shadow, because you don't know it. The image that the shadow gives you, is your illusion. The illusion you gave it, will be part of the total illusion because we learn from each other.
School is not a cave, it is the key to be part of our illusion.
-Yannick-
If Plato is right not only is school a cave, then in a sort of way our whole life is a cave. In this cave you have different corridors. All the corridors have different walls that protect us and limit our movements. In the beginning we can only enter a few corridors. In these corridors we have to obey the rules of our parents and teachers. When we graduate we can enter the next stage. We can choose the corridor of company A or company B. There we listen to our boss. We can even dig our own area, and start our own business. However if we do that we still have to compromise with the government. Our whole society is based on staying inside the cave. Take our constitution, we all agree with it. However if you do not, we think you are stupid and you get punished. You get locked up and we will teach you what is right and what is wrong. There is nothing wrong with it, actually it is quite the opposite we all love it. We all love safety and most people hate it to take initiative. We prefer watching moves instead of making them. The people that do take the risk and therefore do go outside the cave we reward them, with honour and high salaries. There nothing wrong with it, this system is even older than our existence.
Plato's cave analogy is, i think, very applicable to our school life in a sense that we are kept in a very sheltered society till we become of age and go out into the world on our own.
Plato's idea that there are people who go out of the cave and return to bring information and knowledge to the people inside could be compared to the teachers in the school, bringing us information from the outside world to prepare us for graduation and moving on to our own life.
We are trapped in school by the law just like Plato suggests people are trapped in the cave by the "Wardens", being taught what to expect and how to react to the world outside.
School can be seen as a sort of shadow of the real life waiting for us, in the same way that the shadows "foreshadow" the reality outside the cave.
But even in light of these similarities between the cave and school, the possibilities that our WHOLE LIFE is a cave seems plausible too, because even though we can go home after school, there is no real escape from the media and the constraints of social society around us.
We live under the constant threat of being dissociated from civilization for not being compliant with the rigid structures of a pre-taught regime.
But its probably best not to think about it too much, these things can not really be changed and, after all, its just a theory.
The notion of the cave serving more as a prison is one which I consider to be true to some extent. Though more applicable to our society as a whole, school settings create a similar sense of unknown inprisonment. Seeing as we rarely truely question its importance/exsistance.
In relation to Plato's analogy the authority of the teachers (enforced by a system of punishment) act as the living fire. Their light being used to project the sometimes useless curriculum into our minds.
Yes, we learn to read, write and calculate as part of a general knowledge, which is needed to maintain a certain level of humanity. However, I agree that much of the content which we as students are exposed to in school is devoid of any credibility in our future lives.
The true reality of the situation
is that many of us do not attend school with the intention of absorbing every last detail for future causes, but rather to releive ourselfs from our fear of failure. Then we use whatever little information that we managed to keep to plan and influence the future of the upcoming generations.
Though largely overated, the intentions of the school system are well. It is, in a way, just another asset to society. A tool which harbours us as are molded into workers, so we can later on be released into, survive, and carry out the exsistance of the life outside the cave.
School and system!
Socrates was hated, because he pointed out things out and made others feel dumb in Greek society because of his questionings. Look how history remembers him! A great philosopher, a man that represents philosophy.
Great people are often attacked by the masses, people don't like it when someone is better than them, so they drag them down. They realize you recognize something they can't and don't want to recognize.They will try and drag you down to their level.
Stay strong, don't let them drag you down.
After all schools teaching us the propoganda that they need to teach from the system. Our schools seem to encourage us to fight for what we think is right, but do you really believe this? We always read emotion packed stories. Then the teacher rambles about things how it should be. We read about history but who saids that this is how it went? I mean the one who is victorious writes history. Who saids the government doesn't change books so we are learning what they actually want? If you think differently than school is teaching you mostly get a big dot on you, cause you are not one of the millions who are followings systems life, your different! For example Martin Luther King, and Pim Foruyn they were killed by the system for being different. The system was afraid that real truth will come on table. So they kill anyone who stand up against it, it already starts at school!! . You are allowed to speak up for what you believe in. Unless of course, its against the states pathetic agenda. Either way, your going against their advice. If you fight for what you believe in, your wrong because those thoughts are BAD! If you don't stand up, then your being weak, and that is bad too. I suggest you fight for what you believe in, and don't believe in everything what you get teached or see in the news etc. Actually in LIFE!
I HAVE A DREAM that the system ones will go down and we will be free again. And our future children will start setting up not a state were everything is already planned from when you were born untill the end.
I agree that Plato's cave analogy can be applied to our situation in school.
From an early age we are put into schools where we our taught what our parents and teachers think they know we should learn. We our taught that this education will lead to our sucess and happiness once we our graduated and off to live our own lives. But do we even see our own lives? Our lives outside this cave we are sent to?
We our sent to these schools without our consent five times a week for hours on ends, for a good fifteen years. What will happen after school? More school? Is this cave preparing us for another cave?
We our sent to school to learn everything we need to know to escape this cave that our parents put us in, and we my not see the light for a very long time. We get molded in this cave, into our teachers, we get one-sided stories stuffed into our heads. We turn into thier idea of normal children, who turn into normal people, with normal jobs. Of course, there our the ones who realize this cave surrounding them, and know how to beat the system. The people who get the life they want, and know how to leave the cave when they are ready and not when everyone else says they are ready.
It's a brutal thought once you realize what we our doing, and how for most of us, we must survive in this dark cave to have what we want in life, but we do escape eventually, even if a lot of our life has flown away. This cave can help our future if we give in to this system from the begining, even if we dissagree with it.
-karly
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