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Volume 10,Issue 8

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15 July 2026
The Educational Task of Teaching Ethically: Plato and the Republic and the Challenge of Education, Authority, and Moral Guidance in a Pluralistic Era
Wenyan He
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1 The Center for Teacher Education Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China,
JCER 2026 , 10(6), 63–69; https://doi.org/10.26689/jcer.v10i6.15466
© 2026 by the Authors. Licensee Whioce Publishing, Singapore. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
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Abstract

The paper re-examines Plato’s Republic as a classical source of the ethical duty of teaching. Plato explained the idea of education as not the imparting of information but rather the turning of the soul away from opinion to the truth through the allegory of the cave. However, the philosophically trained person has to go back into the cave where truth meets convention, power, and resistance. The motion of ascent and descent reveals a persistent problem of modern teachers: what should be done to lead students to the good without taking over the monopoly on moral authority? Based on the theory of education by Plato, the Socratic method of teaching, the current teacher ethics, moral education, and value pluralism, the paper states that teaching is not a value-free technology or an authoritarian teaching of morals. It is instead an ethical and dialogic process that develops the ability of the students to perceive, ask questions, make judgments, and behave in responsible ways. Teachers ought not to assert any sovereign ownership of truth in a pluralistic era; however, they are unable to leave their students to relativism. Their challenge is to establish educational environments wherein students acquire the skills to evaluate appearances, arrange desires, face conflicting values, and build up responsive moral agency.

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