But if we do possess knowledge, whether we attain it before or after we are born, that fact remains that knowledge still exists and we had to learn it at one point. But as Socrates states in the theory of recollection, our souls already knew all knowledge. There had to be some point in time when our souls did not know anything and were given the chance to learn. This negates both Meno's Paradox (because the soul had to go from not knowing to knowing) and the Recollection theory at the same time, for if the soul cannot learn anything, it cannot recollect what it does not know. In another example of why the recollection theory does not work, Socrates asks a slave boy, who had no prior schooling, certain questions about geometry: "Tell me now, boy, you know that a square figure is like this?" Here we can tell that Socrates is indeed controlling the boy's answers by asking him a leading question. He does not ask what is this figure, but instead gives the answer within the question. The boy is answering according to how Socrates is asking the question. Here, we can see that Socrates experiment with the slave boy does not prove this theory.
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