Synthesis

Both of these papers were very well written. It’s amazing to see how the truths people cling to are hardly actually discovered for themselves. Both Plato and Freire discuss how it is people know what they know, and how people become educated. Freire uses analogies, while Plato uses an example of how people first learn.

Freire compared a teacher and the students to containers. The teacher’s task was to fill the students with his lectures, while the students retain all that they can, without really understanding the reasons behind the words. He believes that humans best learn by figuring out on their own, reading deeper into things.

Plato’s example was people living in a cave discovering things about them and trying to figure out what those things are. One example was an echo with shadows. How would the people know that the echo is just sound waves being bounced back off the walls of the cave? By agreeing as a group on what the shadows and sounds were, they understood more of what was around them.