Plato's The Republic

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The Republic In Plato’s Republic, there are many ways in which education and the nature that surrounds it is shown, but is it really possible to learn without discomfort? The first of three aspects of education that will be discussed is how knowledge accumulates over time. The second aspect is how reluctance to be educated and to be shown that one is wrong will make it impossible to learn. And lastly, how it is important to be uncomfortable in order to learn. The first aspect appears at the beginning of the dialogue and explains how, in order to learn, it is necessary to do more than just fill your soul with facts. We are given the image of prisoners in a cave, chained, and unable to see anything besides what …show more content…

They are reluctant to accept his new knowledge because it is different than their own. The people in the cave created a system to test ‘intelligence’ -seeing who could best identify the shadows that passed and who could predict which would happen next- and when the prisoner returns to share his experience and to tell them that the shadows are just shadows, that what they know is wrong, they are quick to judge. They think that he’s crazy, they don’t understand that, because he had seen the sun, his eyes need to readjust to the darkness of the cave. He is considered less intelligent simply because he hasn’t had time to get accustomed to the dark after having ‘come above out of the light’. They come to the assumption that leaving is dangerous. If anyone tries to free them and force them outside the cave, they will try to kill them. This shows how if people resist and are hostile towards education, it’s much more difficult and unlikely that they will to go from the darkness to the light. If they are not wrong, they are not uncomfortable, therefore their lives are painless, but they will never truly learn which shows that being wrong is part of the discomfort that comes with

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