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             American society teaches us that success and happiness is measured and goes hand and hand with having a college education. It is learned from a young age that getting a college degree should be one's primary goal; a goal which will ultimately lead to a long and prosperous life. The Greek philosopher Plato believed that man's goal in life should be to move closer to enlightenment and truth. On the other hand, Jean-Paul Satre, a well-known existentialist, maintained people should be responsible for their own actions and those choices would determine how they lived their lives. If students attending college had to adopt these ideas or points of view from these two idealists, the students' overall success and classroom performance would depend heavily on which view they accept.
             Plato believed that everything in the real world viewed by society was misleading. In "The Allegory of the Cave," Plato conveys his ideas of how truth and reality is not what it seems to be and how the shadows in the caves represent reality for the prisoners. Plato writes, "To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of images" (Plato 522). The prisoners in the cave only knew reality as what they saw in the form of shadows on the wall of the cave. Plato would more than likely consider a college education as just another shadow on the wall, whereas college students (the prisoners), would see college as a reality and the truth. Any education received in the physical world and taught by people who didn't understand what ultimate truth and enlightenment was, would in Plato's eyes be viewed as false knowledge. Plato then communicates his idea that it is still possible to move towards enlightenment by setting a scene where the prisoners are released from the cave and undergo the process to understanding what is the truth. In the allegory, Socrates explains what hap
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