Is school a cave?

400 years before Christ, Plato accounted for this sense of another reality in his ‘Allegory of the Cave’. According to this view on reality, we are prisoners in a cave, looking at the shadows of puppets on the cave wall. That is to say everything we see around us is just a illusion. We may think we see trees and cats and BMWs, but in fact they are only shadows, projected by the light of a fire and some fancy puppeteers. Outside the cave are the true trees and cats and BMWs, or the pure ‘idea’ of these, which would hurt our eyes to look at.

If Plato is right not only is school a cave, then in a sort of way our whole life is a cave. In this cave you have different corridors. All the corridors have different walls that protect us and limit our movements. In the beginning we can only enter a few corridors. In these corridors we have to obey the rules of our parents and teachers. When we graduate we can enter the next stage. We can choose the corridor of company A or company B. There we listen to our boss. We can even dig our own area, and start our own business. However if we do that we still have to compromise with the government. Our whole society is based on staying inside the cave. Take our constitution, we all agree with it. However if you do not, we think you are stupid and you get punished. You get locked up and we will teach you what is right and what is wrong. There is nothing wrong with it, actually it is quite the opposite we all love it. We all love safety and most people hate it to take initiative. We prefer watching moves instead of making them. The people that do take the risk and therefore do go outside the cave we reward them, with honour and high salaries. There nothing wrong with it, this system is even older than our existence.