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.
The mountain can be metaphorical. It doesn’t have to be impossibly distant or impossibly tall. You don’t have to be Newton and re-derive calculus from scratch to learn to appreciate what he actually did, what it means, and why it matters. You still have to look at the water. This, it turns out, is a difficult skill to convey. So is stepping away from the equations and learning to feel the forces in your bones. But without that, it’s questionable whether the thing being learned is “science” in the sense of ability-to-understand-reality.
Prosaically speaking, you can teach science in classrooms.
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.
The mountain can be metaphorical. It doesn’t have to be impossibly distant or impossibly tall. You don’t have to be Newton and re-derive calculus from scratch to learn to appreciate what he actually did, what it means, and why it matters. You still have to look at the water. This, it turns out, is a difficult skill to convey. So is stepping away from the equations and learning to feel the forces in your bones. But without that, it’s questionable whether the thing being learned is “science” in the sense of ability-to-understand-reality.