Lessons on knowledge transmission from Plato’s allegory of the cave: the influence of reason and companionship on transmissive and participatory pedagogies

In this paper, I show the ambiguities in the interpretations of Martin Heidegger and Alain Badiou of Plato’s allegory of the cave as an enlightening educational experience. In Heidegger’s interpretation, knowledge appears as a rational process that corrects the thinking of others. By his claim of an education by truths, Badiou prioritises, again, the Platonic event of knowledge. To indicate the limit of the rational process in these two interpretations of education, I introduce Jan Masschelein’s claim that knowledge transmission in Plato’s cave story can be seen as a process where the immanent experience of companionship comes before the instruction of knowledge. The arguments in this article will be discussed in a broader context that explains how transmissive and participatory pedagogies have been influenced by the view of education as a process of rationality and companionship, and how the various approaches have either constrained or broadened the learner’s perspective.