Main Theme of the Allegory of the Cave by Plato

Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" has as its central image prisoners in a cave, who are chained to a wall and unable to turn their heads. While it is Plato's intention to use these prisoners as a metaphor for persons untutored in the Theory of Forms, they can also be used to apply to students coming to college. College students are the current version of Plato's untutored persons. The fire behind the chained figures can then be seen as the illuminating light of knowledge. This light, when seen only partially, is however likely to induce illusion rather than true knowledge. Thus puppeteers behind the prisoners create illusions with the combined effect of puppets and the fire. This can be seen as representing the limited knowledge gained in life before entering the illuminating environment of college. The shadows and echoes cast by the real objects are taken as real by the prisoners, as they do not know anything beyond that. The chains then represent the limits of ignorance, of which the prisoners do not appear to be aware.

In the same way a student entering college to become an airline pilot has only limited and even illusory knowledge of the world and the various perspectives that are possible to apply to the world. These students are then prisoners as it were to their current worldview, and are unable to escape this until they are shown different ways of viewing things. In Plato's work, the prisoners accept their chains and their limited view of things because they are unaware that anything else exists.

So also do the names for objects within the cave signify only a limited view of the things being discussed. "Book" for example, is explained to be merely a shadow of a book, but the shadows are all that the prisoners are used to. Therefore to them the shadow of a book is actually the book itself. The prisoners make a mistake without realizing it, because they are unable to turn their heads and see the true form denoted by the name "book."

In this way then potential airline pilots are unaware of the variety of ways in which to see forms and spaces from an aircraft. Once learning begins, this paradigm slowly changes to include a variety of new perspectives, which would then become accepted as truth. Plato further uses the image of the mistaken prisoner to expound that language does not consist of names for physical objects, but of names for things that can be grasped only by the human mind. This is then applicable to the different perspectives offered to the limited mind of the trainee airline pilot. It is as if the student has emerged from the limiting cave, and flying offers him or her a sun by which to see much more than was previously thought possible.

When the prisoners emerge from the cave, it is to see true objects by the light of the sun rather than the limiting and deceptive light of a fire. A further issue is movement, which is enhanced by perspective and freedom. The prisoners can turn their heads once they have been freed from their chains. When a trainee pilot enters the aircraft for the first time, he or she becomes acquainted with a perspective that was not before considered. Thus the previously assumed paradigms of perceptions change in order to incorporate the new truths discovered from the air. Greater freedom of movement and thought is possible once the chains of ignorance have been broken. This is especially true in an aircraft, and also in other directions of study.

College careers as a rule are designed to offer a new perspective, and new directions for thought movements. Thus a student entering college emerges from a world where the school system has often been oppressive and limiting. Schools for example often offer only one perspective on topics such as literature, philosophy, and other sciences and arts. The systems taught in schools are thus accepted by children as the only way to view things, as the book's shadow on the wall of the cave is viewed by prisoners as the book itself, because they have not been shown any other way to see things. Students emerging from school to college then experience not only a physical evolution in terms of a change of environment, but also a mental evolution in terms of thought and philosophy.

Plato's ideology of Forms then has evolved in the culture of the student to become thought and perspective in terms of ideas and vision. The new "forms" seen by an airline trainee thus constitute elements such as the earth, sea and clouds seen from a different physical perspective. For the student of philosophy, literature, or religion, these new forms can entail a different mindset than the one they have grown accustomed to at school. Indeed, at the very least these students are made aware that knowledge entails much more than a single perspective of either the physical or the unseen world. As the prisoners then see the error they have made in terms of forms, students begin to see the error of a single-minded vision.