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Matt Preciado Professor Alapin English 102 10 March 2014 Break the Chains Picture a world where the planet Earth was flat and billions of stars circled this central point of the Universe. Imagine that mighty bearded or angelic gods governed the weather, elements, and decided facets of your life like love, hate, war, strength, intelligence and ultimately your passing. There were times where each image was accepted as truth. There has always been an innate urge in Human Nature to explore our world around us and try to make sense of everything we see. This urge has taken us from seeing a rainy day and believing that a powerful supreme being is in a bad mood to seeing it and analyzing what the barometric pressure is today and how the humidity and accompanying wind will decide the odds of precipitation and remarkably accurate temperature prediction. Its taken us from thinking the lights in the sky are simply signs and patterns drawn or placed there by something greater to knowing what they are and traveling to the biggest light, the moon, and sending the Mars Rover to another light to look for signs of pre-existing life. There are places you can still go today and attempt to describe things like this and sound crazy. There are constantly new things learned, and there are always those individuals that cannot grasp the idea or simply choose skepticism and disbelief. The philosopher Plato described a scenario where one person was able to explore and see amazing wonders that the rest of his group were denied and how that person was not accepted back into the groups reality. Platos analogy is an excellent example of the enlightened and the people

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left in the dark; because it gives a relatively simple, though detailed, illustration of his interpretation of education which everyone can look at and attempt to plug into their own opinion. In the book The Republic Plato, there are translations of Plato describing a cave where some men are trapped and secluded from the world. Imagine men in a cavelike underground dwelling with a long entrance, as wide as the cave and open to the light. The men have been chained foot and neck since childhood. The chains keep them in place and prevent them from turning their heads, so that they only see forward. (Larson 174-175) I see this as the way most people start off. These men are more or less blank slates educationally. All they know is what is projected or cast on the cave wall they face, what they see. That is generally what we know growing up. We know the very basics of what we see. As babies, the immensely influential psychologist Jean Piaget described us as little scientists (Wood). We must try everything and test the physics of everything. We go from having a firm understanding of facial expressions as early as five months to, very shortly after, learning object permeneance, the idea that just because you cant see the toy anymore doesnt mean it isnt there anymore. Piaget discussed many things about a babys habits that are pure discovery. A child who throws a cup from their highchair to see what happens to the object and the sounds that will result is nothing too far from a scientist who decides to mix two chemicals with a theory in mind. This is all trial and error and how people learn from the stage of infancy. The chained mens lack of influence or direct outside exposure has kept them in that stage. While the idea of a lifetime of solitude and physical restraint is an extreme example, there are people whose minds are the ones chained. There are people who have not learned to expand their mind. They are stuck in a mentality of assimilation, where they only try to fit what they see

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into their current understanding, and if it doesnt make sense, it is rejected. People who are deemed educated, are in the mentality of accommodation, where they are enlarging their mental capacity to fit input from the wider world (Belsky 23). The man who is unchained in the cave is suddenly exposed to the outside world and finally able to make sense of the things he had never seen directly, heard clearly or understood. He is a freed mind. He is more than willing and excited to take it all in. He wants to see everything and share it with his friends who are still captive. Unfortunately, the chained men are trapped minds. They dont have the capacity to understand things they arent exposed to directly. There are people in the world who you can take a book to and try to teach them all you know of a topic, and they dont believe it or understand it. It could be someone from a third-world country that has never heard of cloning through stem cells or the idea that on another planet there is a vehicle we control remotely from earth that draws its power from the sun and analyzes the surface of Mars for signs of water or carbon life. Whether by choice or by pure inability of comprehension, they are captives of their own ignorance, doubt and/or reluctance to accept that which is unseen to them. These are men still in the cave that Plato is attempting to depict in his scenario. Whether by choice or lack of opportunity, there will always be people whom are considered educated and uneducated. Platos analogy of the men in the cave is an excellent portrayal of what the differences between the two people are. There is a lot that can be taken from his story and be interpreted, and I encourage anyone to come up with their own understanding of this. Though, the overall message is that the educated man frees his mind to believe and experience so much more, while the uneducated man remains trapped in a cave with a mind that is chained down and believes only what it sees in front of it.

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Works Cited Plato, and Raymond Larson. The Republic. Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1979. Print. Belsky, Janet. Experiencing The Lifespan, 3rd Edition. New York, New York: Worth Publishers, 2013. Print Wood, D. How Children Think and Learn, 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Print