Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Wachowskis' The Matrix are similar in the idea of people who can wake up from their dream world artificially designed for them, and get back to the real God-created world. Although the real world in Plato’s Cave is full of natural beauty and that in The Matrix dark and almost hopeless, both highlight the significance of waking up and staying away from the dream world however comfortable and peaceful it is.
The fact that some students are so deep in the goal of passing exams that they forget about the true meaning of education is much like living in a dream world without any awareness of the real one. That might be one of the reasons why some of them threw their history materials out of the window right after learning that it was not a subject among the final exams. Either that, or there is something wrong with their “righteous minds”*.
How can we teachers wake them up? How can we explain the assumed disconnection between knowledge taught at school and that required at work or in life? How can we just simply tell them: “We do what we have to do in order to do what we want to do.*”?
* from The Great Debaters
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Allegory of the Cave and The Matrix