Plato, the Cave, and Marcus Rashford: A KS3 Experiment It’s been a while since I uploaded a blog post — I’d hoped to do this every couple of months, but time seems to have slipped away from me. What I’d like to share today isn’t something I claim as entirely my own. As with many of my classroom ideas, it’s inspired by a whole host of sources, and particularly in this case, my fantastic school RE colleagues. Recently, we’ve been working hard to introduce more challenge to our Key Stage 3 RE curriculum — particularly for our Year 7 students. One of the ways we’ve done this is by introducing them to concepts we might not have tackled at this stage in the past. A notable example of this is our examination of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the Theory of Forms . We introduced these concepts not by diving straight into ancient Greek philosophy, but by using modern examples that students could relate to. One of the key figures we di...
In my blog, I often share teaching techniques inspired by past lessons. In my first blog post, I discussed using chocolate to illustrate a tricky concept related to the ontological argument for God's existence. The aim was to explore the idea that the reality of something can be greater than the mere thought of it. I gave students chocolate with their eyes closed, then asked them to compare the sensation of tasting the chocolate with just imagining the taste. This led to a discussion about how existence can add a dimension of reality that thought alone cannot capture. This relates to the ontological argument's claim that God, as the greatest conceivable being, must exist in reality, as existence is a perfection, and a being that lacks existence is not as great as a being that possesses it. Of course, there’s always one student who says they prefer the idea of chocolate. Recently, I was teaching the Design Argument (the teleological argument) to my A-level students, focusing on...