Plato’s Philosophy of Education &Ndash; Anamnesis

In the democratic Athens, it was believed that any person, with proper education, could be trained to become a virtuous citizen and ruler. In fact, the education of the young aristocrats aimed to shape the students’ characters according to the great mythological heroes of the Odyssey and the Iliad. For Plato, however, this was not necessarily true as people are born different.

It is not possible to understand Plato’s epistemology without taking into account that Plato understood that knowledge cannot be created, it has to be recollected through education, inspiration and art (this process was called anamnesis). So all knowledge and all truth already exists in the ideal plane – the original home of the soul – but the part of the soul which is incarnated and subjected to the limitations of the physical body has the task of recollecting this knowledge in order to reflect it into the physical world, and therefore, make a conscious walk back to its source.

An advocate of the theory of the transmigration of the soul, Plato believed that each person needs many incarnations in order to purify the senses so that they can be channels through which truth manifests itself. Obviously, those who are ahead in the evolutionary journey are more likely to develop virtues than others, but all souls are equally faded to arrive at its destiny – this is the human fate.