The Dangers Of Fear In Plato's The Allegory Of The Cave

A young boy runs screaming down a long dark hall; afraid of the monster that he just witnessed coming from his room. As he runs towards his parents room he thinks of the his mother telling him that there is “no such thing as monsters”, however the fear overshadowing him right now tells him that his mother’s words were clearly false, and as he opens the door to their room he screams “Monster! Monster!”. Calmly the boy’s mother takes him down the dark hall, back into the room where he first encountered the monster. As the boy stands timidly behind his mother she turns on the light, only to reveal the boys teddy bear sitting in front of his night light.
As a child many of us had an experience like the one described above. Is it our fault that the perceived danger we saw was …show more content…
Of course not; although we know what our parents told us, we also know that we saw a real monster. It is not until we are shown the truth that we finally understand the words that were told to us many times before. In much the same way education cannot be something that a person simply receives; it has to be experienced before we can completely understand it. As Plato states in The Allegory of the Cave, education is not “like putting sight into blind eyes”; instead it is the process of turning away from what it put in front of us and finding what is true for ourselves.
The process that Plato describes involves two parts. First a student must have the desire and willingness to absorb knowledge, and secondly must be able to take that knowledge and use it to challenge their preconceived truths. Just as the child in the story would have seen the