I hesitate to write this comment, because I feel like it should be predictable, but I guess I will anyway.
It sounds like you’re maybe making the point that science, as a human endeavor, involves people sharing facts with each other about the natural world. That is sideways from the frame of the parable, which is about the scientific method from an epistemological perspective, so I think you’re missing the point.
The truth, like the fountain of youth, is where it is, and can’t be moved. If you starting off thinking “gravity on Earth’s surface accelerates weights downwards by 8 m/s/s”, what doing science will do is point you towards instead thinking “gravity on Earth’s surface accelerates weights downwards by 9.8 m/s/s”. When you’re ‘there,’ or believing true things, you get lots of benefits in terms of accurate predictions; as soon as you leave the mountain (i.e. swapping out 9.8 with some other number), you can’t take the ability to create accurate predictions with you—using the wrong inputs gives you the wrong outputs.
That said, there’s a perhaps deeper philosophical disagreement here. I think that “learning” is much more real than “teaching”. [Teachers construct learning environments for students, but as the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.]
And further, most “science” classrooms are really classrooms for teaching consensus facts about the natural world, not doing “science.” The facts of the periodic table are quite different from the methodology by which the periodic table was discovered. Someone who merely memorizes known facts, and doesn’t touch the apparatus by which facts comes to be known, is not partaking of the fountain of youth.
I hesitate to write this comment, because I feel like it should be predictable, but I guess I will anyway.
It sounds like you’re maybe making the point that science, as a human endeavor, involves people sharing facts with each other about the natural world. That is sideways from the frame of the parable, which is about the scientific method from an epistemological perspective, so I think you’re missing the point.
The truth, like the fountain of youth, is where it is, and can’t be moved. If you starting off thinking “gravity on Earth’s surface accelerates weights downwards by 8 m/s/s”, what doing science will do is point you towards instead thinking “gravity on Earth’s surface accelerates weights downwards by 9.8 m/s/s”. When you’re ‘there,’ or believing true things, you get lots of benefits in terms of accurate predictions; as soon as you leave the mountain (i.e. swapping out 9.8 with some other number), you can’t take the ability to create accurate predictions with you—using the wrong inputs gives you the wrong outputs.
That said, there’s a perhaps deeper philosophical disagreement here. I think that “learning” is much more real than “teaching”. [Teachers construct learning environments for students, but as the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.]
And further, most “science” classrooms are really classrooms for teaching consensus facts about the natural world, not doing “science.” The facts of the periodic table are quite different from the methodology by which the periodic table was discovered. Someone who merely memorizes known facts, and doesn’t touch the apparatus by which facts comes to be known, is not partaking of the fountain of youth.