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Applying Plato’s Allegory to Real Life Issues Essay When one wonders about the purpose of school, the answer that immediately comes to mind is quite simple: to educate the children, to prepare the youth for the real world. Then, the animosity students display towards school is seen as resistance to enlightenment, laziness, and inability in the students’ part. However, it cannot be that a system designed for the future is loathed by the future. Even though it is not a science that would have definite results, Plato’s cave allegory can help us gain deeper insight about the school system by simplifying the topic without losing the abstract parts of it. In school, students are fixated on a shadow reality, a world that is far from real, yet treated as absolute even by those outside of it. Students, like the prisoners in the allegory, play the game of who can spot the shadows best and who can predict the next one. Those who excel at it, are rewarded with ‘good grades’, that make even the students’ parents, who clearly live outside the cave that is school, swell with pride. This only increases the student’s fixation on their ability to play the shadow game, which only tightens their shackles. The main shackle students have is their inability to question, which has been strengthened through …show more content…
Its purpose is to simply benefit the puppeteer. After all, the government gives companies a lot of money to write books and create tests to aid students in learning. People not noticing this makes one wonder if the puppeteers of the present are far more sophisticated than the ones Plato conceived. Creating a cave within the cave and allowing people to exit the first one, would indeed prompt them to accept the second cave as the real world. If a bird escapes a cage, it would think that it is free, it wouldn’t think that the room is a prison on its

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