Karlee Facey, a grade 12 student from Halifax, N.S., was in the corner of the gym and paused her workout to check her email. Her jaw dropped when she read the email stating that she had won the King’s essay contest. She ran across the gym to tell her friend and called her mother at work to share the news.
“It’s kind of embarrassing,” she said, “I actually started jumping.”
The King’s essay contest is held every year. Grade 12 students are invited to write a short essay in response to a question. This year, students received the following prompt: At King’s, the books students read all pose a challenge—to the reader, to society, to literary canon, to our own ideas of the past or present. Through reading these books, students learn to question their own assumptions. Choose a book that you think is challenging, and tell us why that challenge is important?
Facey chose to write her essay using Plato’s The Republic, a book that she first encountered in a philosophy class she took in high school.
“It’s what I had the most opinions about,” she said, adding that she was also liked the many possible approaches to analyzing the text.
Opting for a text that she found philosophically challenging, she created a new document and began recording different ideas, many of which did not make the final cut. Eventually, she settled on the question of justice and the allegory of the cave. In Plato’s allegory, there are prisoners chained in a cave, facing one of the walls. They are only able to observe the shadows cast on the wall, and therefore, their entire understanding of the world is shaped by illusion, for they are completely unaware that they are trapped and isolated from the rest of the world.
In her essay, Facey wrote, “while the allegory is often read as an inspiring call toward enlightenment, it is one of the most thematically challenging passages in philosophical literature –not because it is technically difficult, but because it attacks the reader’s first and foremost assumption, that the world they perceive is the world as it truly is.”
One of the most compelling themes in Facey’s essay is the connection that Plato makes between justice and enlightenment. “For Plato and many others, justice is not a social state, it is an occupation of the soul.” When explaining the allegory of the cave, Facey says that Plato very clearly argues that the prisoners represent the choice each person makes about whether they want to learn and think critically of the world. As “most people’s sense of justice is constructed from shadows, from assumptions and cultural consensus that have never truly been tested,” Facey concludes that the “most quietly devastating challenge is the allegory’s suggestion that reality is ultimately a choice and that the choice most people make is to stay in the cave.”
Asked for her thoughts on the original question on the importance of reading challenging books, Facey’s response is simple: “I don’t think there is any other way to learn.”
As the winner of the essay contest, Facey’s prize is a gift card to the King’s Co-op Bookstore that covers the full cost of her books for the Foundation Year Program. She is looking forward to attending King’s in the fall and planning to study literature and play on the women’s soccer team.
“I’m so excited.”
