Plato

The "Allegory of the Cave" by Plato, represents what we believe is reality and what is not. It is considered to be the most beautiful and famous metaphor in Western philosophy. This metaphor is supposed to represent that what we see through our senses is not reality, but only an artificial world. In order to see this real world, one must be intelligent and know that knowledge cannot be handed down from teacher to pupil. A student mind must be directed towards what is real and what is important in order to capture it themselves. We live in a world of ignorance and we are so used to it that we even tolerate it. Whenever a person has to face the truth it scares them, but when the truth comes out they are going to want more. In this story, a dark scene is being described and inside this cave is a group of people that have been here since birth. They all have been told the same thing and each one of them has been raised under the impression that nothing else matters besides the shadow that they see. One person is being release from his entanglement and has managed to be free to observe everything around him. Overwhelmed with excitement of what the subject saw, he plans to discuss what he had seen to the other people back in the caves. As he tells them what he saw, they laughed at him and did not believe him. It is like comparing two people who were both ignorant in the beginning, but then one of them saw the light, and became knowledgeable of his surroundings. The goal of education is to bring as many people out of the cave as possible so they can see reality. A modern example of the cave is a group of family members that stays