Plato wasn't making a case for discerning fact from fiction using obviously fictitious sources (literature, dramas, TV, your friend Rob, etc).
He was illustrating that our own senses and perceptions prohibit us from seeing reality in an objective nature.
He compared the escaped prisoner to an enlightened philosopher, who has learned to use his mind and abstract thinking in order to see what his eyes cannot.
Plato isn't saying, "Don't believe what you read in the newspaper," he is saying, "Don't trust your eyes and ears at all, because your entire reality might be false."
That doesn't very much help a kid understand not to believe what he sees in advertisements or to distrust friendly faces who want to control them.
Either we're talking past each other, or you haven't put all that much thought into the implications of the whole "shadows on the cave wall" metaphor. You're right in that Plato wasn't offering us advice for distinguishing fact from fiction. He was saying that as far as anyone can prove, it's all fiction.
Basically, I'm saying that instead of being prisoners, we have entered the cave voluntarily, and have delegated our senses to the wall. In addition to Plato's puppeteer, the one unavoidable agent of indirection between us and objective reality, we now have two, our senses and our screens.
If you treat screens and speakers as if they are literal manifestations of the cave wall, it's no longer an abstract philosophical point. I'm saying that the only responsible thing I can tell a child is to believe nothing they see on a screen until they're old enough to argue with me about it.
Plato wasn't making a case for discerning fact from fiction using obviously fictitious sources (literature, dramas, TV, your friend Rob, etc).
He was illustrating that our own senses and perceptions prohibit us from seeing reality in an objective nature.
He compared the escaped prisoner to an enlightened philosopher, who has learned to use his mind and abstract thinking in order to see what his eyes cannot.
Plato isn't saying, "Don't believe what you read in the newspaper," he is saying, "Don't trust your eyes and ears at all, because your entire reality might be false."
That doesn't very much help a kid understand not to believe what he sees in advertisements or to distrust friendly faces who want to control them.