"Crap Detector"

Postman and Weingartner suggest in Teaching as a Submersive Activity that "our intellectual history is a chronicle of the anguish and suffering of men who tried to help their contemporaries see that some part of their fondest beliefs were misconceptions, faulty assumptions, superstitions, and even outright lies." (p. 3) While the job of education is to teach men to think about their beliefs, one must be weary of some of the suggestions the authors give. One of the roles of these "crap detectors" is to give "new meaning" to something in our world. You cannot change the meaning of truth; you must recognize truth and set wrongs of the past right. Slavery was not right because the people of the past believed that was the natural order of things. It was still wrong, but it took a group of men dedicated to the principal that all men are created equal to set it right.