Plato on Education: After the Allegory of the Cave

You have probably heard the story of the prisoners who spend their lives watching shadows on a wall. And if you are like most people, you found it beautiful, found it deep, and the next day everything was the same. Plato's view of education is on the page that is usually left out: right after the cave, in Book VII of The Republic (518b-d), he says that to educate is not to put knowledge into a soul that lacks it, but to turn the whole soul, which already sees, toward where it should look.

The cave in a few lines

People are chained from birth, facing a wall, unable to turn their heads. Behind them, far off, is a fire, and between the fire and them objects are carried past by others. Only shadows appear on the wall, and since they have never seen anything else, the prisoners call that the world.

One of them is freed. The light hurts him, the climb is painful, and outside the sun blinds him, until he learns to see: first shadows, then reflections, then things, and finally the sun. He goes back to tell the others, and those who stayed, Plato says, would kill him if they could (517a). That is the short version. The full version, with the Greek text and a reading of the image, is in the channel's video on the Allegory of the Cave. This article begins where it ends.

Where this story appears

The allegory is not a standalone text. It appears in Book VII of The Republic, and The Republic is a book about justice that, halfway through, becomes a project of formation. Plato's question there is practical and uncomfortable: how do you form someone worthy of deciding for others?

The answer is uncomfortable for our time. Many people who make decisions are not fit to make them, and not because of bad character or lack of ability: they lack formation, the direction that leads to justice, truth, and the Good. This is what the Greeks called paideia, the whole formation of someone who lives in a city. And in that reckoning, all of us are included: you, me, and whoever is governing you.

That is why the cave accuses no one. The prisoners were born there, and no one chooses the starting point. The cave sketches the starting position of every person. What Plato asks next is not who is to blame, but what to do to free someone.

It is not giving sight to blind eyes

Right after the allegory, Plato attacks a common definition: that education means putting knowledge into a soul that lacks it, like giving sight to blind eyes (518b-c). The source lesson turns the idea into a scene: the educator as a surgeon who opens the mind, deposits the content, closes it up, and hands back someone who now knows.

For Plato, the premise is wrong. Knowledge does not come from outside: the soul already carries it, and learning is recollecting. That thesis has its own article, recollection in Plato, and returns here as a premise, because it is what makes education a matter of direction and not of deposit. Someone helped to find what they already carried, like the boy in the geometry lesson in the Meno, has received nothing from outside. They have been led to reason.

Turning with the whole soul

Plato's definition (518c-d), in paraphrase, is this: education is the art of turning the organ around in the easiest and most effective way, not of giving it sight, because it already has it. What it lacks is the right position, and the work is to provide the means for it to look where it should.

And he is precise about one thing: it is not only the eye that turns. The eye cannot pass from darkness into light without the whole body, and in the same way it is the whole soul that turns. The word is periagogé (περιαγωγή), a turning around, a conversion, and Plato takes it up again later to speak of the conversion of the soul (521c). If the problem is direction and not capacity, the amount of good material you have consumed decides nothing. You can read a hundred books staring at the wall, and that is what the article Does Reading Many Books Help? developed from the same image.

Educere: the teacher points, is not the source

The definition has a consequence for the one who teaches. The word education comes from the Latin educere, to lead out. The teacher, the trainer, the educator leads: shows the direction, says "look here, look there." The mind is not theirs, and the eyes are not theirs either; they belong to the student.

The lesson calls this humbling for the teacher and liberating for the learner. Liberating because your formation never depended on access to someone special: it depends on you being turned, and turning is something you learn to do on your own after a few tries. It is the same reason that, in the cave, no one installs light in anyone. The light is already outside, and what is asked is that the soul turn toward it.

What turns you: what resists you

Plato does not leave the question of how hanging. What pulls the soul from what changes toward what remains, he says, is whatever forces thought to work when the senses do not settle things, and his favorite example is mathematics (522c-531c). A perfect triangle does not exist in the world, and yet you can demonstrate things about it with certainty. At the top of the path is dialectic, which is the capacity to give an account of what a thing is (532a-534b).

The criterion the lesson draws from this serves for choosing what to study: a text that does not challenge you only entertains you, and what educates is what resists you. Anyone who wants to go to the source has two short paths. The first is Book VII of The Republic, reading not only the allegory but the pages that come after it, where Plato defines his concept of education. The second is Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, by Werner Jaeger, which shows how all of Greece thought about human formation.

Everything attributed to Plato in this article is paraphrase, using Stephanus numbering and the reference edition by Maria Helena da Rocha Pereira (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation). The source video walks through this path in order, from the cave to the definition and from the definition to what is done with it.

Continue: Does Reading Many Books Help? What Plato Would Say · Returning to the Cave Without Giving Up Your Refuge · Recollection in Plato: recognizing what you never saw · Capitoline and Caravaggio Museums
Source lesson: O Mito da Caverna explicado: a educação segundo Platão