e possibilities outside of therealm of singular understanding, and by exposure to different things, determine new understanding, then Plato would assert that all men have the potential to move from ignorance to knowledge.The basis for the "Allegory of the Cave" is this: a prisoner is held in a cave for his whole life (since birth), only able to see and experience that which is placed before him. For example, the fire that is used to luminate the cave becomes the center of the world much like our own sun is such a compelling central component, and the prisoner experiences everything that he sees and understands relative to the fire. In conjunction, the fire become a means of visualizing other elements, including exposure to a puppet and the shadows on the wall, and all of these factors makeup the specifics of what is known in the world of the prisoner. The divided line is an imperative concept within the scope of this premise. In essence, the teacher is the individual who directs the pursuit of knowledge past theinitial limitations that have been set. It is not the teachers responsibility to simply say "here is the sun, here is the moon...now you know everything" because the student would never understand the process necessary tocontinue with the directive of self education. As a result, the process of wisdom requires that individuals adapt and learn their own skills for learning. Knowledge, then, is not simply sensory based (because the prisoners in the cave, for example, believed they had the knowledge of the fire, the shadows and the cave itself as if these were the only elements in the world that needed to be known), but also extends past our senses into the realm of logical reasoning, constructive reasoning, and a process orientation to learning and developing wisdom. Rather than simply producing information and addressing the learning process and the students in order to bring them into complicity, it is Plato's contention th...
