Skyllz and Plato’s Just State

Skyllz
Skyllz
Published in
3 min readMar 26, 2018

“The purpose of education is to give to the body and to the soul all the beauty and all the perfection of which they are capable” — Plato

Plato (Athens, 428/427–348/347 BC) created the first concept of university, as he firmly believed that all people can coexist in harmony when society gives them equal educational opportunities. According to his philosophy, equal educational opportunities lead to a just society, since the political and economic system are run by competent individuals.

In the Plato’s ideal State, educators are key for the future development of their students.

Since Plato had been strongly influenced by the Socratic Method, he believed teachers must acknowledge their knowledge limits, and consequently improve themselves, through the power of dialogue. Personal improvement lies on the desire for a constant questioning. Only through a continuous self-challenging of our comfort zone, we grow up in education as an individual and, therefore, as a professional in any field.

Modern education unfortunately, despite the wealth progress of our society, has definitely failed in becoming equal. Disparities in higher education attendance are huge (ranging from 0% to 98 %), for different reasons (source: Global Education Monitoring Report). Inequalities are based on different key factors which can be environmental (geographical area and regions); anthropological and cultural (ethnicity, religion, and gender); economical (wealth). From the age of Plato, it does not seem we, as a cultural society, have improved that much, as education is not available for everyone, meaning it is not empowering individuals. Actually, it is more the opposite: we have built a system where, for being offered the best educational options, you must come from some privileged group.

Therefore, only certain people will be able to get access to wealth, and, wealth being a key factor to determine the educational offer, this paradox situation will generate a never-ending loop, where only a restricted part of the society will be empowered. The rise of e-learning platforms has helped people finding educational solutions at a lower price, with a wider range of options, than it used to be a few decades ago.

However, due to the high competitiveness of the work market, recruiting criteria still rely mainly on choosing professionals/graduates coming from prestigious Colleges. This condition perpetuates a situation of elitism, where wealth is primarily accessible to those who have the possibility to attend the most exclusive programs, in the most renowned universities.

This system of selection has nothing to do with the individual knowledge, but totally depends on the colleges’ reputation. With this scenario, it is hard to imagine a “just”, “equal”, and “harmonious” society, where culture and knowledge confer empowerment to individuals.

At Skyllz we aim to provide a human-centered solution, allowing people to decide how to build their own reputation, based on their set of talents, changing the perspective of the current education system, with a new concept, based on the tangible demonstration of capabilities, skills and attitudes.

Our mission is to replace the outdated resume, with a trustworthy, portable and reliable digital reputation, by means of the Proof-of-Skill protocol.

Skyllz is an open-source Blockchain-based protocol where users’ competences are validated by external Raters (oracles), in a distributed (Raters must be minimum three) and anonymous process.

What has Skyllz in common with Plato?

Since Blockchain is decentralized and trustworthy, it best represents the concept of a “just society”, where a growing community works on the continuous improvement of talents. In accordance to the Socratic Method, personal growth lies on an open dialogue, so that also the introduction of new skills, in order to enrich the Skyllz Distributed Platform ecosystem, is decided and voted by the community.

The validation of positive skills, make individuals desire to proof themselves in new areas of expertise, making their sets of ability constantly grow. With this new configuration, only the smartest individuals succeed and we create an inspirational and encouraging ecosystem, where only positive skills are annotated, thus driving users to invest efforts in building up their reputation, and boost their talents.

join Skyllz’s philosophic revolution in Education and Talent Brand!

P.S: for more info, join our community!

Telegram// https://t.me/Skyllz

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Skyllz
Skyllz
Editor for

https://skyllz.org | First blockchain based and distributed skills validation protocol to showcase, track and boost human talents across applications.