Plato argues to Meno that all knowledge is already present in our immortal souls. By this he suggests that learning is simply a matter of recollection and not teaching. Socrates goes on to prove his point to Meno through the illustration of having a slave boy perform steps of geometry that no one had ever taught him. Through this he demonstrates that knowledge can be arrived upon easily just by asking the right questions, a stiff argument for his inborn knowledge theory.
             Plato comes to this "doctrine of recollection" for the reason that, after all of his thinking it seems impossible to know something without already knowing it. Saying that you know F=MA would be very difficult without having already known about it and all the things surrounding it (forces and accelerations and just physics in general), while many other concepts would be out of our grasp without knowing F=MA. You would have to have some sort of concepts of force and mass, how else would you explain them? To just simply come up with this idea would be impossible according to Plato. In order to explain this he proposed this argument.
             The style which Plato uses to prove his point is by asking questions until the knowledge has been "recalled". This style has taken root in modern education. Many math classes now do not simply throw information at you, but rather throw questions that lead you to information on your own. This style of teaching has proven very effective and I believe, gives much credit to Plato's argument.
             It seems to me clearly absurd to be basing a principle that says we never learn anything on the idea that we learned it all in previous lives, and thus already have the knowledge. It would seem unwise for someone trying to put forward Plato's theory to suggest that reincarnation was a fundamental part of the doctrine and could not be separated from it. Clearly this would mean the death of the theory if it was true, but I don...