a ruler of State, a true guardian.The guardians must master dialectic and be able to employ it to grasp the good. The long and arduous road to becoming a ruler of the State begins with informal intellectual stimulation. Plato advances the position of early learning as amusement, so as not to discourage children from it. Gradually, the most promising children are tested; those who succeed move on. The education and training of a guardian is a combination of the different types of knowledge and experience available to human beings, from the purely speculative and academic to the experiential. In this way, the guardian emerges, after fifty fully realized years, the only person capable and worthy of ruling the ideal State. He is, in Plato's terms, the perfect, or at least the complete and just, ruler, the philosopher-king, just as the State can be the only truly just state. The Allegory of the Cave is one of the clearest explanations in all of his work of Plato's view of how human beings learn. This view is linked to his idea of the immortality of the soul (discussed in book X), and works like this. Since the soul is immortal, we are born "knowing" everything we will ever know. All we have to do is remember it, or be guided into remembering it. In the dialogue Meno, Socrates proves this by leading a slave boy into "remembering" a geometric proof, rather than teaching it to him. This is the way Plato feels all learning works--a teacher's job is to guide students into remembrance of things known, rather than filling them with new things. The Allegory of the Cave displays this very clearly, and integrates itself into the analogy of the Sun and the Line. The light of the Sun, or the Good, shines down upon things and helps the student to a remembrance of them--he does not have to be told what they are once the light is on them, he recognizes what they are now that he can see them. The four stages of the cave man's journey are equivalent to th...
