In Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave, Socrates and Glaucon had a long, in depth discussion about how an extended metaphor related to learning. In the allegory, cave dwellers were chained to a wall. The effects of the chains are drastic. These restrict the prisoners to look elsewhere, except for forward. They cannot turn their heads left, right, upward, or downward, only straight on. They can talk to the people to their sides, but have never seen their face or understand what objects stand in front of them. Since the people pinned to the wall grew up in this manner, they have an extremely limited experience of their surroundings. Given that they have no prior knowledge of objects, shadows on the wall can be a multitude of things. They only
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Like most things in life, the positive aspects are shown to provide interest. For BU, academics, student body, and the location were most emphasized. As great as they are, there are still qualities of the school that limit movement and interaction, just like the chains for the cave dwellers. For example, the campus limits students physically, socially, and mentally. The several hundred acre campus blocks students in from the rest of reality. Residence halls, food, rooms for education, convenience stores, sports complexes, and even a chapel are no more than a ten minute walk from one another. I understand that students have the opportunity to leave campus, but it is not needed. Students do not need to go out of campus when their reality suffices for everything they need within a short walk. Although the chain is not as strict as the actual chain in the allegory, both do a similar purpose with limiting interactions between us and “outside the …show more content…
The highly respected university gives us a false reality especially regarding campus. Bellarmine University is a cave. As beautiful as the campus is, this school, like most colleges, keeps students in. It does not take us to an outside world. The close proximity of all of the building misleads us into thinking that everything that we need is always going to be right in front of us. We still live in a world full of appearances. We have a very limited experience on surrounding when we live in the same cave for approximately four years. Just like the cave dwellers, this leads to an experience where we can misjudge our environment. Our perspective is different than people living in different caves beyond the arches at
Like most things in life, the positive aspects are shown to provide interest. For BU, academics, student body, and the location were most emphasized. As great as they are, there are still qualities of the school that limit movement and interaction, just like the chains for the cave dwellers. For example, the campus limits students physically, socially, and mentally. The several hundred acre campus blocks students in from the rest of reality. Residence halls, food, rooms for education, convenience stores, sports complexes, and even a chapel are no more than a ten minute walk from one another. I understand that students have the opportunity to leave campus, but it is not needed. Students do not need to go out of campus when their reality suffices for everything they need within a short walk. Although the chain is not as strict as the actual chain in the allegory, both do a similar purpose with limiting interactions between us and “outside the …show more content…
The highly respected university gives us a false reality especially regarding campus. Bellarmine University is a cave. As beautiful as the campus is, this school, like most colleges, keeps students in. It does not take us to an outside world. The close proximity of all of the building misleads us into thinking that everything that we need is always going to be right in front of us. We still live in a world full of appearances. We have a very limited experience on surrounding when we live in the same cave for approximately four years. Just like the cave dwellers, this leads to an experience where we can misjudge our environment. Our perspective is different than people living in different caves beyond the arches at