Plato’s Allegory of the Cave’

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is a story written to explore the nature of knowledge and education, It is structured around the idea of the metaphor of light being knowledge.

Education should be engaged in a movement upward from lower to higher. For Plato this basically meant the mind should be educated to move from lower things that are based on sensory data to higher things based on reason or rationality.

Plato invented many level of our perception and understanding and has been hugely influential on how we think about knowledge and educations

Plato wants us to recognise the possibility that there are aspects of the work of which we are at best only dimly aware – we are as if in chains but only seeing shadows.

The ideas in Plato’s story of the cave have been remade many times. Do we really want to live in the real world or a more comfortable fantasy? Some examples -

The Truman (1998) The Matrix (1999) Inception (2010)