The Book of Woke: Introducing Critical Constructivism

Summary

In this episode of the New Discourses podcast, James Lindsey delves into what he considers the cornerstone of woke ideology: critical constructivism, through Joe L. Kincheloe’s book. Critical constructivism, blending critical theory and constructivist epistemology, posits reality as a construct of social power dynamics and individual perception. Lindsey argues that this framework is essentially a worldview and critiques its application in education and its pervasive influence, suggesting it serves as an ideological framework guiding contemporary understanding. He critiques its complexity and refutes its dismissal of objective reality.

Highlights

• Lindsey discusses Kincheloe’s book as the 'big boy book of woke.' 📖
• Critical constructivism combines critical theory and constructivist epistemology. 🔗
• Reality is perceived as a social construction, challenging the notion of objectivity. 🌪️
• The ideology is seen as a worldview, akin to a religion, influencing education. 🏫
• Lindsey argues it's a totalizing worldview that breaks with reality, embodying cult-like characteristics. 🔔

Key Takeaways

• Critical constructivism views reality as constructed by social power dynamics and perceptions. 🎭
• James Lindsey explores this ideology through Joe L. Kincheloe's work, viewing it as foundational to 'woke' culture. 📚
• The framework serves as a worldview that eschews objective reality, challenging traditional educational and social structures. 🌐
• Lindsey criticizes the ideology's complexity and its potential to mislead educational methodologies and societal norms. 🔍
• He provides a critical lens on how this approach influences understanding, emphasizing its cult-like nature. ⛔

Overview

In the latest installment of the New Discourses podcast, James Lindsey embarks on a deep dive into Joe L. Kincheloe’s book on critical constructivism, which he terms the 'big boy book of woke.' This episode unpacks the profound and often perplexing principles behind woke ideology, as laid out by Kincheloe, which challenges traditional paradigms of knowledge and reality.

At its core, critical constructivism is introduced as an amalgamation of critical theory and constructivist epistemology, asserting that reality is not objective but constructed through power dynamics and perception. Lindsey critiques how this aspirational framework positions itself as a comprehensive worldview, potentially misleading educational approaches and undercutting foundational societal norms.

Lindsey highlights the cult-like attributes of this ideology, drawing parallels to religious and ideological dogmas that demand total adherence and reshape realities. He questions the impacts of such perspectives on education and broader social structures, urging listeners to critically engage with these frameworks that reject conventional notions of objective reality.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 02:00: Introduction to the Book of Woke The chapter introduces the 'Book of Woke' and sets the stage for discussing its themes and concepts. James Lindsay, the host of the New Discourses podcast, begins the conversation by acknowledging the title of the book and suggesting that it will explore and annotate the principles and ideas associated with the 'woke' movement. The chapter likely sets a foundation for understanding the broader discourse that will be analyzed throughout the book.
• 02:00 - 06:40: Defining Woke and Critical Constructivism This chapter begins with a reference to a previous podcast episode titled 'Woke for Dummies,' where the speaker read from a book by Robin D'Angelo and her co-author Ozlem Sensoy, titled 'Is Everyone Really Equal?' The speaker highlights this book as an introduction to the concept of 'woke' and suggests that more episodes discussing it may follow. The 'book of woke' is described as a foundational understanding of what 'woke' means.
• 06:40 - 09:00: Origins and Personal Exploration This chapter, titled 'Origins and Personal Exploration,' begins with a story illustrating the journey the author takes the reader on. Despite being described as a short book in terms of pages, the reading experience is quite tedious due to its dense content and specialized jargon. This introductory chapter sets the tone for a deep and potentially challenging exploration of themes likely related to personal growth and understanding. The author notes the seemingly simple yet complex nature of the writing style, indicative of an intricate narrative ahead.
• 09:00 - 29:00: Analysis of the Critical Constructivism Book The chapter titled 'Analysis of the Critical Constructivism Book' discusses the work of Joe L. Kinchelo, a significant figure in critical pedagogy. Kinchelo, who passed away about 15 years ago, was associated with McGill University in Canada, where he contributed to critical education theory. His book, 'Critical Constructivism,' is the focal point, emphasizing his approach to educating children and those intellectually undeveloped.
• 29:00 - 32:00: Conclusion In the 'Conclusion' chapter, the speaker discusses the origin of the term 'woke', attributing its codification to a specific book and individual downstream from Paulo Freddy and Henry Jaru. The speaker acknowledges the debate around the use of the term 'woke', using it knowingly but noting the controversy it generates.

The Book of Woke: Introducing Critical Constructivism Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] Hey everybody, it's James Lindseay. You're listening to the New Discourses podcast and we are going to read from what I call the book of woke. So a lot
• 00:30 - 01:00 of you will have heard the podcast where I did kind of woke for dummies and I read from this book by Robin D'Angelo and her um her writing partner Senoy what is it something Oslam Senseoy uh some time ago is everyone really equal and in that podcast I mentioned there is a book that I refer to as the book of woke so that's the baby version to tell people what woke is and maybe we'll do more episodes about it later. But then
• 01:00 - 01:30 there's the big boy version. So, I'll tell you a story first and then I'm going to dive into the book. I'm going to read to you from the first chapter of this book uh a bit. It's a very tedious and long book. It's actually it's it's relatively short in number of pages, but every page takes a toll on you to read. So, it feels very long. Even though again woke is always written kind of although there's lots of specialized jargon with lots of syllables. It's always kind of written like they're
• 01:30 - 02:00 writing to children or intellectually undeveloped people. Um but at any rate uh this book is called critical constructivism and it's by Joe L. Kinchelo who was he died um 15 years ago or so. uh he was a critical pedagogist or pedagogue. In other words, he was critical education theory and he was I think at McGill University in Canada um doing his critical education theory. So
• 02:00 - 02:30 he's downstream from Paulo Freddy and Henry Jaru to place him. And it is my opinion and this is a story I'll tell you in a second that he actually is the one and this book is the book where woke was originally codified. So in the thing that we call woke what is woke? I don't use woke glibly although I do use it somewhat casually in conversation. A lot of people have been very upset with my use
• 02:30 - 03:00 of the term woke right where um this is obviously some kind of contradiction to people because woke means left and right means right and how can left be right and can dogs be cats and rain be sunshine. How can this be? How can water be dry? This makes no sense. How can fire be cold? I think Chris Rufo himself said that how can fire be cold or something like that or whatever. Anyway, when I'm talking about woke, I mean
• 03:00 - 03:30 critical constructivism. Now, that's a lot of words. And in fact, that's only some of the words. There's another word. So, it's more syllables. Critical constructivist epistemology is the technical term. So, here's the story. I think this was maybe as early as 2017 or 18. It was a long time ago, seven years ago. And I was trying to put lines around what nobody was calling woke yet. The left was barely calling it self-woke
• 03:30 - 04:00 yet. And certainly none of us criticizing it were calling it woke yet. And so we were calling it um out of the Senoy and D'Angelo book is everyone really equal. I had suggested the term a lot of people were calling it social justice warriors or regressive leftism. There were a lot of terms and I was suggesting the term critical social justice which I got very serious about through 2019 and 2020 and obviously this term caught on with slightly more
• 04:00 - 04:30 academic people and nobody else. And the reason that I use that term is isn't it good to call people what they call themselves? Well, no, not really. because they call themselves things that are flattering to themselves. And unless you can attach a lot of like irony or sarcasm to that term, it's not going to work. But anyway, critical social justice, which basically meant the pursuing of social justice through the means of critical theory, as I outlined in woke for dummies uh podcast reading
• 04:30 - 05:00 from Seno and D'Angelo. She also invokes not just the um the critical theorists which she names by name specifically says this is where our stuff comes from. Uh in fact they also invoke the uh postmodernists like Fuko and Dereda. Uh and so critical is the critical theory school part and constructivism is the postmodern part. I've said this 8 billion times, but Jordan Peterson was
• 05:00 - 05:30 correct when he was suggesting yet another term for this phenomenon way back when, which was in his very Jordan Peterson way of putting things, postmodern neoarxism, you know, and that never stuck either because simple rule guys, if you're looking for a term for something, accurate is fantastic when you're an academic, but syllables and hyphens do not translate into words that people will use. People will not use
• 05:30 - 06:00 complicated terminology with prefixes, syllables, and hyphens. Neo anything is right out. The second you add neo to a word, everybody that's not a nerd has tuned out. Just get used to that. Critical constructivism, however, I was trying to figure out what woke was. And I'm digging around and I don't even remember what in the world I was searching. I was searching the internet pretty much, you know, wildly trying to find more information about this and I
• 06:00 - 06:30 find I might have been looking up critical pedagogy itself. I don't know. But I come across this entry in Wikipedia that's not even the main entry. I found a section in a different entry on Wikipedia about critical constructivist epistemology. Maybe I got there from the critical race theory entry. Maybe I got there from something else. I can't remember. But I find this section that's not even the entirety of a Wikipedia entry called critical
• 06:30 - 07:00 constructivist epistemology and it credits it to Joe Kinchelo. And it lays out, you know, 20 or so bullet points of what critical constructivist epistemology means. And I'm reading this and I'm like, "Holy crap, this is woke." Well, I didn't call it woke. This is what we're fighting. This is social justice ideology, I think, is probably what I would have been calling it at the time. This is social justice ideology. It has a name. It has a formal name. And I remember getting in an argument with somebody who was on the woke side of
• 07:00 - 07:30 things and who said, you know, you can't criticize all this social justice stuff. It's supposed to be really good for, you know, oppressed people, blah blah blah. They' bought the whole sales pitch, the whole lie. And um it's not you, you know, you have to be serious about it. And so I said,"Well, there is a serious term which is critical constructivist epistemology." I started to explain it and I shared the link to the specific section on Wikipedia. And this person got very mad at me saying that I wasn't
• 07:30 - 08:00 proving anything by sending some random link to some random complicated term nobody uses. But I was. And that's the thing is there's an academic foundation. academic in the loose sense, academic foundation for what we call woke and it's critical constructivism. Now, I knew there was this book out there by Kinchelo called critical constructivism that outlined the idea. It was hard to find. I mean, you
• 08:00 - 08:30 could find a stub for it on Amazon, but there were none available. It was out of I don't know if it was out of print, but you couldn't buy any. or it's that usual thing where it's like you could get it for like 800 bucks and nobody's paying 800 bucks for a freaking paperback. Could not find a PDF of it. Could not find um a digital copy anywhere. Could not find anybody who had it. And so the book of woke remained beyond my grasp in its formal
• 08:30 - 09:00 uh type until about last year. And so sometime last year, as you all know, my friend and my co-author Logan Lancing, who wrote the quering of the American child with me, is also very interested in critical pedagogy. That's the critical theory in education. He's very interested in getting it out of education. That's kind of one of his primary missions. And he somehow found an affordable copy of this book, which I happen to have in my hand right now. So,
• 09:00 - 09:30 he got the book, he read the book, he loaned me the book, I've read the book, he did some podcasts, some very admirable podcasts. So, if you're not listening to Logan Lancing's podcast, you need to go start doing that. Uh, it's called The Lancing, and he went through some of this book. If you want to understand what woke really is, I mean, you can listen to my podcast that I'm going to do here and maybe some more on this book later, but he already covered this ground and he did a fantastic job. And one thing I'll tell
• 09:30 - 10:00 you about about Logan is that he is a better communicator than I am. Okay? So, he really has a talent, a true knack for being able to read this stuff and relate it in ways that everyday people understand. So, if you need a good podcast, it's called The Lancing. You can find Logan Lancing on social media and follow him and you can pay attention to what he's putting out. You can also buy his books. He's got in addition to
• 10:00 - 10:30 The Quering of the American Child, he's got a book called The Woke War Path that he wrote before this. But his podcasts on this book are fantastic. and he puts on on Twitter or X or whatever frequently now that if you read and understand the first two chapters of this book, you understand woke. I've been asked to work on a on a on a lawsuit as an ex uh as a expert witness and I won't get into the details of it in case that's awkward for for the the suit, but I will say that this book has
• 10:30 - 11:00 been my major source in proving my case. uh and the case that I'm making in fact is that transgender medicine as it gets called or gender affirming care is not actually medical at all. It's ideological. The entire phenomenon of transgender is ideological and critical constructivism is the explanation for why. And ideological actually understates it. What we're about to hear is that all my claims that that woke is a a religion have strong legs to stand
• 11:00 - 11:30 on because Joe Kinchelo who in my opinion codified woke made it formal wrote it down in a whole book about it explains and it's going to be it's on page seven of this book so it's not very far in but it's going to be in the first page that I read to you that it's not it's not just a way of thinking it's not just an epistemology in fact as critical constructive epistemology. It is a worldview. It is an entire way of viewing the world. In fact, he uses the German term, the
• 11:30 - 12:00 formal formal German term for worldview. And so that means it's a it's it's beyond just a anal set of analytical tools or a it's even beyond a lens. It is a total worldview. Um in fact, I would say it's a totalizing worldview. And it's a worldview that makes a complete break with reality. It is not a realist worldview. Realism means that you believe reality exists
• 12:00 - 12:30 out there, meaning outside of you, and that it exists for all possible observers the same way. And that we're observing a real reality out there. It's not in our heads. It's not a simulation. And so I'll start here a little bit in the middle. I don't want to read all of this tortured book. He says, "Whether we know it or not," and this is Joe Kinchelo, "he whether we know it or not, all of us are theorists and that we develop and hold on to
• 12:30 - 13:00 particular views of how things are." So that's a great place to start because it reflects again the way that cultists operate. It's that I called it dialectical inversion before. Hey, there's this thing that we do which is to be a theorist in this case to theorize about how the world works and make that a totalizing ideology really a worldview. There's this thing that we do and basically everybody does it all the time. So now we're going to say that
• 13:00 - 13:30 everybody does the same thing that we do. So we're not doing something wrong because everybody's always doing it all the time. And here's the now we'll make the case for why what we're doing is good. So whether we know it or not, he starts off all of us are theorists and that we develop and hold on to particular views of how things are. Developing and holding on to particular uh views of how things are is a very very generic and abstract way of articulating what theorists do. That in
• 13:30 - 14:00 fact is not what theorists do. Theorists do something far more specific. But remember the formulation going to get deep since this is the big boy book of woke. Remember the formulation from Hegel of the dialectic abstract negation concrete. Now a lot of people think that that means and I think this was a big breakthrough for me in understanding and I want you to pay attention if you're chasing the Hegel rabbit hole which applies to the Markx rabbit hole which applies to woke which applies to all of this stuff. It was a big breakthrough
• 14:00 - 14:30 for me to understand that these are doing verbs. A lot of people think you start with the abstract and then you find its negation and then that allows you to arrive at a more concrete understanding. That's not what they do in practice. That's not what they do. What they do first is completely abstract the concept that they want to put on the table. Here it is. All of us are theorists whether we know it or not. All of us are theorists in that we develop and hold on to particular views of how things are. They've taken the
• 14:30 - 15:00 most abstract possible articulation of what it is to be a theorist and said whether you know it or not you are this because of you fitting this very general abstract definition. In past discussions I've said that what they do is they go up and down in the levels of how abstract how abstractly or concretely they're talking about something in order to be able to get away with what they're doing. And we could talk about that in terms of hermetic principles as I think
• 15:00 - 15:30 I did at the time or could uh but that's not for today. So what they do is it's the abstract negation concrete. Those are all doing verbs. First you take the thing you want to mystify and you make it as abstract as possible so that you confuse people as to what you're actually talking about. We're all theorists now. Then you negate it and you explain why uh there are um what the opposite is and how it's integrated into the the uh original
• 15:30 - 16:00 abstract concept to then arrive at the concrete which is to either say the thing that you're targeting with criticism if you're using a critical approach or the thing that you're trying to advance if you're putting forward your idea. So Kinchelo goes on he says such views insidiously shape our actions. So here's the negation of being a theorist. So first you abstract being a theorist. It just means holding on to particular views of how things are. Now you're going to negate it. Such views
• 16:00 - 16:30 insidiously, so that's implicitly a criticism. Insidiously shape our actions as lovers, emotional word, parents, citizens, students, and teachers. Also a weird word to stick in an education book. By the way, the first thing you list in terms of how your world view uh as a so-called theorist informs you is as lovers in an education book, they always are so weird. Critical
• 16:30 - 17:00 constructivists understand this reality and argue that the social, cognitive, and educational theories we hold must be consciously addressed. There it is, concrete. First you take the idea of theorist and you make it abstract so it applies to everybody and you say oh so that's like me. Then you negate it and say these things can be very dangerous and insidious and they inform everything that we do and if you have it wrong it's not going to be good. And then you say
• 17:00 - 17:30 we the critical constructivists actually understand this. Most people are on autopilot but we get it. Welcome to the cult by the way. We understand this reality and argue that the social, cognitive, and educational theories we hold must be consciously addressed. Such conscious awareness allows us to reflect on our theories, explore their origins in our lives, change them when needed, and consider how they may have unconsciously shaped our teaching and our actions in the
• 17:30 - 18:00 world in general. Thus, we come to better understand. So see when they come they first they abstract everything out say everybody's doing it and then they explain why theirs is the best uh and everybody else is is wrong because hey look your theory informs everything you do in life and if you aren't paying attention to it consciously like we do you're missing a lot of important stuff and that and that impacts how we do things teaching loving etc
• 18:00 - 18:30 etc. Thus he says we come to better understand as great educators always should. So again there's a tie to identity. You are an educator. You want to be a great educator. You have a should an obligation to come to better understand the ways the world operates and how that operation shapes education, educational policy, curriculum, the lives of teachers and students and who succeeds and who doesn't in schooling. So you inject the conflict theory by
• 18:30 - 19:00 class, the knowowers and the non-nowers or aspy puts it those who are deemed to know and those who are not allowed to know. See how I mean this is one paragraph. This is a extremely rich and deep book. It's worth mentioning that this book like all woke books, like all Nazi and fascist books, is a grimoire. In other words, it is a spell book that puts the spell on you while you read it,
• 19:00 - 19:30 unless you know how the spell works. The book pulls you in and gets you to misunderstand reality as you go through it. So that the book in in a sense is is enchanting you to believe what it's arguing. Uh, and the the techniques are all linguistic and tricky, but we're kind of unmasking them. And I'm not going to be quite so detailed in every paragraph, but I want to get this foundation down. Critical constructivists, he tells us, are painfully aware. See, it's hard for
• 19:30 - 20:00 them. It's difficult. They're making a sacrifice. They are painfully aware that many forces in the 21st century are at work to remove such insights from the realm of teaching. See, the nefarious forces, the demi-urge is out there making sure that this conscious awareness is being removed from teaching. Now, notice that he's saying this in 2005 is when this book was published when woke was being injected into education at probably the
• 20:00 - 20:30 most rapid rate up until, you know, post 2015 when they got the law on their side. Woke was on an ascending arc. It was going into education more and more and more. And he still says that they're painfully aware, critical constructivists, they themselves are painfully aware that many forces in the 21st century, so that's spiritual language, are at work to remove such insights, cult idea, from
• 20:30 - 21:00 the realm of teaching. This book works to illustrate the importance of such understandings in the bizarre educational cosmos of the 21st century. While many view constructivism and critical constructivism as theories of learning, I see them as this and much more. So like I told you, it is not just a way to approach education or thinking even. Constructivism and critical constructivism involve theoretical work
• 21:00 - 21:30 in education, epistemology, cognition and ontology. So these are fancy words. Epistemology means a theory of knowledge. Cognition is a theory of thinking. Ontology is as he defines it the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of being and asks what it means to be in the world. Now obviously he is dipping into Paulo Freddy about
• 21:30 - 22:00 this but what the way the Marxists answer the question of what it means to be in the world is that you are a product of your structural and material deterministic forces that have pigeonholed you into a set of what they call historical circumstances or a historical location or sometimes a social position or in the stupid woke language of today positionality. So you are a uh product of historical forces that have led you to be who and what you
• 22:00 - 22:30 are. And you I I need you to get this in critical constructivist views, woke views, you are that you are the product of your historical construction. You are not different to that. You are not something else. And in fact, except by awakening to the woke worldview and rebelling, you pretty much cannot be anything else. Everybody's just going along on autopilot with false consciousness until they awaken to the
• 22:30 - 23:00 woke critical constructivist epistemology or or or philosophy that allows them the worldview that allows them to question that. And critical constructivism, meaning this book, it's in italics. I argue for a unified theory where all of these dimensions fit together and are synergistic in their interreationship. Do you remember the podcast I did? I know it was a long time ago about John Henry Newman's book, The Idea of the University. You probably don't know it
• 23:00 - 23:30 by that name because I did not talk about the university in the title of the podcast. I talked about theology, the necessity of theology. Remember, PS, the rumor is that James hates Christians. the necessity of theology and what I said about a theology, how did I define it? Following Newman, who by the way is was a devout Roman Catholic in the 1850s, uh, following Newman, I defined a theology as a metaphilosophical program
• 23:30 - 24:00 that binds and orients other schools of philosophy such as epistemology, ontology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, teology, and so on and so forth. I said that the point of a theology is that it takes all these disperate schools of thought and binds them together into a single coherent way of thinking, a worldview, and then orients them toward some notion of good, true,
• 24:00 - 24:30 and beautiful perhaps if we're talking about orienting them toward God. Marxist ideologies or Marxist theologies orient toward man. and in fact a um hyperreal man that doesn't exist and cannot exist. A man that is at once his tribal communist self and the uh inheritor of advanced capitalist society and individual rights. So a man directly in conflict with himself a synthetic
• 24:30 - 25:00 hyperreal man. And that's what is Marxist philosophies bind and orient uh all the other schools of thought to. So let's go back one step theoretical work in education, epistemology, cognition, ontology. And he says that he sees in this book he he argues for a unified theory. He doesn't say bind and orient, but a unified theory where all these dimensions fit together and are synergistic in their interreationship. In other words, he's saying that
• 25:00 - 25:30 critical constructivism operates as a theology. It takes other schools of philosophical orientation and binds and orients them under a single metaphilosophical structure. Meta just means in this sense beyond or bigger than. So it's not philosophical in and of itself. It's kind of like an umbrella that combines a bunch of philosophies. It's like a philosophy about philosophies. Um so for example he says it is hard to pursue a critical constructivist pedagogy. a theory of
• 25:30 - 26:00 teaching without the grounding of critical constructivist epistemology and cognitive theories. In this unified context, critical constructivism and here's the sentence. In this unified context, critical constructivism becomes avel schwang a world view. Is that the next word? It changes pages as we go there. A worldview that creates meaning on the nature of human existence.
• 26:00 - 26:30 It's a religion, guys. It meets the general definition of a theology and that it binds and orients other schools of philosophical activity into one world view. And this worldview isn't just a way of looking at the world, a lens. It is one that creates meaning on the nature of human existence. remember that um Ben Clemens in his law article I think it was in Cornell law review but I don't remember
• 26:30 - 27:00 in maybe 99 or thereabouts was trying to answer the question of for first amendment establishment clause juristp prudence what's a religion so if the Supreme Court has to decide are we establishing a religion through the state what are the criteria and he boils it down although he never puts it as succinctly as I'm going to say it he boils it down three criteria. Number one, that it is a comprehensive set of beliefs and practices that number two answers
• 27:00 - 27:30 fundamental questions about the nature of reality and man's role in it, which is to say meaning on the nature of human existence and three such that it gives rise to duties of conscience. So this thing is a religion. Critical constructivism is a religion that is woke as a religion and we are teaching it in our schools. So it is an an established de facto state religion until we get it out of our schools at least our public schools. He says in
• 27:30 - 28:00 this way critical constructivism comes to exert more influence in more domains than it has so far. Now I have to give you a little bit of housekeeping here. So the book is organized to deliver 12 points of critical constructivism. And the way it's written he doesn't ever list all 12 points back to back to back. a few pages before where I started, he lists 11 of the 12 without saying that's what he's doing. And I don't know why he does
• 28:00 - 28:30 that. But the way that it's organized is that 0.1 is given and then a bunch of pages of text, then point 2 is given and a bunch of pages of text and there are 12 points. One way to organize this podcast or this presentation on this book would be to go through the 12 points upfront and deal with each one in brief. I'm not doing that. I'm reading through portions of the book. So, we're going to hear things like 0.1 and you may never hear point 2 or.3 or whatever. So, anyway, the next thing he says is
• 28:30 - 29:00 point one. So, he's introducing a major key idea to critical constructivism, which is to say woke point one. Critical constructivism is grounded on the notion of constructivism. Well, thank you, Dr. Kinchelo. Constructivism asserts that nothing represents a neutral perspective. Nothing exists before consciousness shapes it into something perceptible. Now, let me go on a
• 29:00 - 29:30 diversion that you probably don't want to go on with me or maybe you're interested and you do. Why would you call them the woke right, James, if that's so nonsensical? The first thing the people I call woke right do is deny neutral ground. They say nothing is neutral. Teaching cannot be neutral. Society cannot be neutral. Policy cannot be neutral. And you might say, "hm, well that's true. There is no
• 29:30 - 30:00 neutral ground." And you might go along with him. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that's called constructivism. Constructivism asserts that nothing represents a neutral perspective. Now, I've gone through this in detail before and maybe it'll come up again. I don't remember exactly what pieces I bookmarked here to to read to you. The question boils down to objectivity or not. Neutral is a word for objective. Actually, what it means is that we've stepped aside from any particular
• 30:00 - 30:30 person's biases or cultural worldview or so on. And the argument is that it's always coming out of a cultural worldview. But this is not this is this is a trick. This is a worldview, a manipulation. You of course have a worldview. You of course have values. You of course have a culture and things that you look at things through. You have a family that's informed how you understand the world, a religion that under informs how you think about things. Of course, you the individual or
• 30:30 - 31:00 that the institution has values. The idea of a um program that's trying to find truth, and that's very important, is that people with different values, institutions with different values get to weigh in on the argument. They get to in fact present evidence. Evidence, I would argue, is in fact neutral. Evidence is a neutral perspective. The interpretation of that evidence may not
• 31:00 - 31:30 be, but the interpretation of that evidence has a variety of different ways that we evaluate it for its worth. It's like uh if I have a connect the dots puzzle and I just draw a star of David or an upside down pentagon or whatever pentagram I should say. So, a satanic symbol or whatever instead of, you know, filling in the details of the flower that the thing that the the connect the dots puzzle for little kids is meant to have you draw. Um, I've given an
• 31:30 - 32:00 interpretation of those dots and their their connection, right? And that interpretation is wrong, right? Oh, it's the Jews. Oh, it's Satan. Oh, oh, some evil. Uh, that's wrong, right? And in truth-seeking endeavors, which is not necessarily politics or whatever to to a great degree, and some things are very complicated like sociology and psychology, but in truth-seeking endeavors, we have we have rigorous
• 32:00 - 32:30 methods that allow us to approach objectivity, thus actually to approach neutrality. It's not so good in social psychology where you usually start with your theory and then start fussing around in it. You can hear how that's backwards, but the idea should be that we look at the evidence and we formulate an explanation or an interpretation of that evidence. And we know that that interpretation of the evidence is good when it does certain things. It satisfactorily describes what we're dealing with. It makes valid
• 32:30 - 33:00 predictions. How do you know the predictions are valid? Well, you test them and if it comes true, it comes true. For example, you might predict that when you drop an egg on the floor, it will break. So, you go get three dozen eggs and you drop them on the floor and guess what? They all freaking break. I wonder why that happened. Right? And so, you could create a prediction. When I drop an egg, it will break. You could have a model, a theory for why that's going to happen. If you don't have decent explanatory power and
• 33:00 - 33:30 you can't make valid predictions, like if I shoot this cannonball under these conditions, it will hit this target 22 miles away that's the size of a car and I will never miss. If you're doing that, you're probably doing something true and you probably did come from a neutral perspective. Doesn't give a damn how the person who owns the car you shot at feels. Nobody gives a damn how the cannon operator feels. You ever go
• 33:30 - 34:00 bowling and you throw the ball down the lane and you know you're going to miss and you're like waving your hand to try to magically move the ball sideways so you get a better score. Turns out what you want to have happen doesn't have a damn thing to do with the physics. Once you let go of the ball, you've committed to whatever is going to happen. The the the die is cast as they say. And so you don't get to have your intention that you were going to bowl a strike doesn't matter. Your desire, your bias that a strike would be great is irrelevant. All that matters is
• 34:00 - 34:30 the trajectory and spin of the ball and I guess the condition of the lane. That's all that matters. Or maybe which pins are there. We could get all detailed. You get the point. And so there is a neutral perspective. It's called reality. And we have different ways. Uh, you know, I mentioned descriptive capacity or explanatory capacity, predictive capacity. Um, parsimony is one that we usually throw in. The smallest number of moving parts
• 34:30 - 35:00 to explain it. The ball when you roll it down the bowling alley lane is curving because it is spinning, not because there are invisible elves coming out of the gutter to push it this way or that, or an invisible demon that's dumping your ball into the gutter so that your boyfriend beats you and you're mad about it. Okay? So we we we dis dispense with that. So constructivists say there's no neutral territory. What that actually means is everything's politics. Everything's political. We're going to
• 35:00 - 35:30 drag everything into the realm of politics and the political. But he says the reason for this is that nothing exists before consciousness shapes it into something perceptible. That is a profound ontological statement. A statement about the nature of being. Nothing exists. Nothing exists before consciousness shapes it into something perceptible. In other words, perception actually your perception of the world
• 35:30 - 36:00 precedes its existence. It is not except for how you perceive it. Now imagine if this were to go a little further down the hole. Where would you end up with? your truth and my truth. It's true because you perceive it that way. It was racist because you perceived it that way. True conservative fascists were boxed out of politics because you perceive it that way. The woke right is woke right
• 36:00 - 36:30 because they adhere to a constructivist epistemology. There you go. I'm not being like lowlevel with this and with this accusation here. It's not just me using a name that pisses them off. I mean, I am. It's true. Um, sometimes, uh, it's a saying, a hit dog will holler, but I'm glad the term works, but it's actually accurate. That's probably why it works. So he says to explain in this context we draw upon a constructivist
• 36:30 - 37:00 epistemology to provide insight into how ped the pedagogical world operates rejecting the rationalistic cartisian notion that there is a monolithic knowable world out there explained by western science. They reject western science. Point one first paragraph we reject western science. a constructivist epistemology. He says, "I also refer to this as an epistemology of complexity. You've heard
• 37:00 - 37:30 my rants in the past if you're a frequent listener about people who appeal to complexity and complexity theories in order to be able to basically mystify people." He says, "In contrast, a constructivist epistemology views the cosmos as a human construction." Guys, this is a religion. This is a profound statement. This is anti-real. It is not realist. The cosmos is a human construction. They reject the idea that there's a world out there that can be
• 37:30 - 38:00 described by western science. This is a complete different paradigm for what you think the world is and what it's doing and of course also what men's duties in it are. The world is what dominant groups of humans perceive it to be. He says very plainly again, woke left and woke right agree on this. We live in a racist world because white supremacists run everything. We live in a sexist world because of male
• 38:00 - 38:30 patriarchy. We live in a heteronormative world because of straight dominance. We live in a world of the post-war liberal consensus where true conservative views have been pushed out for globo or whatever the they say. This complicates our notion of theory. positivistic and rationalistic. So, these are all big words. I don't know if it's even worth getting into them. Positivistic basically means that you only believe in things that are true
• 38:30 - 39:00 when you can prove that they're true with evidence. Rationalistic means that you have to be able to use reason to derive what you're looking at. In other words, when uh a positivistic view would only accept that which is grounded on evidence, except if we get into the altruistic side of positivism, which is a whole other school of it's a whole mess. Not getting into that. And then a rationalistic would say that these things have to accord with the rules of reason and logic. So when you try to give explanatory power to a model of how
• 39:00 - 39:30 you see the data as I discussed earlier you're using probably rationalistic tendencies and of course by appealing to the data you're using what they would call positivistic but what you're using is empirical tendencies. Another big word he use that makes no freaking sense for any of this is cartisian world. The the the rationalistic cartisian notion. This makes no sense because Deart was a gnostic. Um, so he had this idea of kind of the
• 39:30 - 40:00 the dualistic of the inner world of man and the objective world out there. And this isn't really how people think of things. We don't really we we know that that's not what this is. And so um by appealing to Deart in this dualistic frame which PS is the Gnostic view of the world. It's a dualistic frame is the Gnostic view. Uh you they can straw man science. They can say science believes in the you know the inner world of thoughts and the outer world out there
• 40:00 - 40:30 and actually humans are part of nature and they can trick people into thinking that what they're saying is profound where what they're saying is actually uh an inversion of the profound. So positivistic and rationalistic theories were simple to the extent that they claimed truth value on the basis of how they corresponded to true reality. So true there is an italics. So that's that's a mocking tone like that the his claim is that the rationalists and the positivists or scientists we'll just say
• 40:30 - 41:00 believe that they're describing true reality where everybody else describes subjective or false reality. Well that's actually what's happening but he's being derisive about it. Uh the fact is that what we consider true and they would critical constructivists reject this completely. What we consider true is that which corresponds faithfully to reality. And you can outline principles upon how you understand that like empiricism. Does it accord what what does it accord with
• 41:00 - 41:30 what the data show? Is the model that you give does it have adequate explanatory power for the phenomenon being observed? Again, does it have predictive capacity? And finally, is it parsimmonious? Does it fail to introduce unnecessary moving parts to the story? So they don't like this. He's but his his claim here is that people like science because it presents this really simple picture of the world where you know we go look at the evidence and we use evidence and reason and and logic
• 41:30 - 42:00 and math to figure out what's really true. Turns out that that's the case. And if you had to line up on one side uh with cannons and the other side with cannons and one side's using so-called positivistic rationalistic science and the other side is using critical constructivism, the critical constructivists are all getting shot in the face with cannonballs and they're going to miss every time they shoot except by luck. And so it turns out true reality is true. Reality is a thing you
• 42:00 - 42:30 run into when your beliefs are false. more complex post-positivistic theories. This is a good way for them to say our Study the various philosophical and social groundings of diverse theories. There's your social part. Learn from them and understand that the social construction and understand the social construction of them all. Critical constructivists take this understanding of social construction and add critical theory to the mix. again on the woke right. Steven
• 42:30 - 43:00 Wolf for example, author of the case for Christian nationalism, woke right lunatic has said repeatedly that he uses critical theory. He said on X, in fact specifically that he doesn't even consider himself conservative because he uses the critical theory of his opponents on the left to drive for uh drive forward his own conclusions. He uses he's defended critical theory as a necessary and important part of the western philosophical tradition
• 43:00 - 43:30 repeatedly. You see calls by other people such as Aaron Ren who works for American Reformer which is the outfit that I hoaxed with the Communist Manifesto who are saying that we need to use critical theory. Don't throw it all out. Critical theory is very important. So they are in fact critical constructivists. They believe there is no neutral territory. That reality is uh our experience of reality is in fact constructed by political power we find ourselves in and that critical theory is
• 43:30 - 44:00 the useful tool for taking this apart. So critical constructivists take this and add critical theory to the mix. Our pluralistic and multi-perspectal or as I have turned it elsewhere bricolage orientation is omnipresent as we seek benefits from a variety of social cultural and philosophical and theoretical positions. So it's all down to seeking
• 44:00 - 44:30 benefit in our social pos our social, cultural, philosophical and theoretical orientations. It's all about political power. An epistemology of constructivism, he says, has maintained that nothing represents a neutral perspective in the process shaking the epistemological foundations of modernist cartesian grand narratives. Just a lot of extra words to say that they reject science. Indeed, no truly objective way of seeing exists. I think the woke right
• 44:30 - 45:00 would agree with this. that your lens that you bring, say from your faith, informs whether or not you can actually see reality correctly. Nothing, they say, exists before consciousness shapes it into something we can perceive. Take him literally. This isn't cute. This isn't a metaphor. Nothing exists. Nothing exists. Nothing is real before consciousness, in other words, or how we
• 45:00 - 45:30 perceive it shapes it into something that we can perceive. What appears as objective reality is merely what our mind constructs. Are you hearing him? He is dead serious about this. It is very hard to understand that the woke do not believe in reality. They believe reality is a product of the mind and the mind is a product of the structural and material conditions the historical conditions that mind was brought up in. Everything
• 45:30 - 46:00 is downstream from the political power of the social and political situation that people find themselves in also economic situation people find themselves in. He means this. What appears I'll say it again as objective reality is merely what our mind constructs. What we are accustomed to seeing. The knowledge that the world yields has to be interpreted by men and women who are a part of that world.
• 46:00 - 46:30 Whether we are attempting to understand the music of West Africa, the art of uh Marcel Duchamp, the pedagogical theory of Michael Apple who was a communist by the way, the philosophy of John Paul Sartra who was a communist by the way, the lyrics of Bob Dylan or the poetry of Audrey Lord who was a communist by the way. The constructivist principle tacitly stands. For example, most
• 46:30 - 47:00 analysis uh most analysts don't realize that the theory of perspective developed by 15th century artists constituted a scientific convention. It was simply one way of portraying space and held no absolute in italics no absolute validity. Thus, the structures and phenomena we observe in the physical world are nothing more than creations of our measuring and categorizing mind. Now, you remember when I talked
• 47:00 - 47:30 about hermeticism's main goal being to overcome categorization and distinction. Let's read that sentence again. Thus, the structures and phenomena we observe in the physical world. So the stuff you see, touch, taste, feel, hear, experience, the structures and phenomena we observe in the physical world are nothing more than the creations of our measuring and categorizing
• 47:30 - 48:00 minds. In constructivist theory, different individuals coming from different diverse backgrounds will see the world in different ways. So here's where he's already rejected the idea of an objective world. So the world is actually subjective. The world as it exists exists inside each consciousness, each subjectivity. So subjectivity leads over objectivity. Why is the tagline for new discourses, by the way, that Michael Fallon thought of shining the light of
• 48:00 - 48:30 objective truth into subjective darkness? It's because the constructivist worldview believes that every single person has a subjectivist perspective that is true for them. And not only true for them, it is a universe unto themselves. That's why it's true for them. They each by dent of their perception have a universe that they alone inhabit and understand. Why? The structures and phenomena we
• 48:30 - 49:00 observe in the physical world are nothing more than the creations of our measuring and categorizing minds. But it's more than that. He goes on to say in constructivist theory different individuals coming from diverse backgrounds will see the world in different ways. In other words, those two say two different individuals, those two universes that they perceive are not commensurate. They come from different backgrounds, different places. They
• 49:00 - 49:30 don't see the world the same way because their worlds are not the same thing. In other words, this is very important to the woke worldview. There is no shared reality to which we can all appeal. Which means the only way we can assert something is real or true or knowledge is by asserting it through political power we have over others to force them to believe what we've said. Now imagine that that's what you actually think is
• 49:30 - 50:00 the nature of reality and knowledge and truth. How would you behave politically? You would spend all your time trying to force other people to believe or articulate, not some other people, all other people to believe and articulate the world that you perceive. You would do that because that's what you think knowledge is. Truth is what you can make other people believe. So if you care about truth or
• 50:00 - 50:30 want people to believe the truth, all you can do is try to force them to see the world your way. And now enter every communist and fascist catastrophe in history. That's what they do. Every cult in history has done this. So I'll read it again and continue. In constructivist theory, different individuals coming from diverse backgrounds will see the world in different ways, but their perception is what generates reality. Imagine, he says, for example,
• 50:30 - 51:00 how a German bank teller, an Igbo tribe person, a Texas rancher, and a woman from a small village in China close to the Mongolian border might describe uh did I leave out a word? How how they might describe a major league baseball game? Okay, that's a complicated phenomenon. Imagine how they would describe a baseball bat, which is in reality, and if some bad guy grabs it and swings it and puts it upside their head is going
• 51:00 - 51:30 to have predictable results for everybody, right? But no, it's the game. So imagine how a German bank teller, an Igbo tribes person, a Texas rancher, and a woman from a small village in China close to the Mongolian border, oddly specific, might describe a major league baseball game. It is safe to assume that that the descriptions would be quite different and even humorous to individuals who have understood the intricacies of the game since they were very young. Do you see how the magic
• 51:30 - 52:00 spell works? There's a right answer about what the game is. And people who have understood it all along will not only think the descriptions from these other people are funny or are wrong, but they'll think that they're funny, that they're amusing. Right? There is no question that the backgrounds and expectations of the observer shape perception. Let me ask you a question. If any of these people watched baseball games long enough, any of them, they watched enough baseball games, not one baseball game, and tried to describe what's happening.
• 52:00 - 52:30 if they watched not one but maybe two or three full seasons of baseball. They sat down every night and picked a game and watched and maybe they picked up a book or two to understand, you know, some of the rules that they're not quite clear on and they listen to the announcers describe why rule violations occurred. At the end of a 2 or three year period of learning the game of baseball, would they all agree on the rules of the game of baseball? Would they all give the same description of the game of baseball? Of course they would. So what this guy is doing is casting a magic
• 52:30 - 53:00 spell. He says, "Ah, but these people will perceive baseball very differently because they come from different cultural backgrounds only because they're still ignorant of it. Once they act, there is a thing that is called baseball. It has rules. It is a game that is played by certain rules in certain certain ways and by mere observation, you're going to pick up most of it very quickly, but over the course of a couple of years of watching a bunch of games, you're going to have it down. Everybody's been through this. Everybody knows this.
• 53:00 - 53:30 Everybody understands this. Even games like chess, which have complicated rules, can be picked up by observation. This piece moves like this. This piece moves like that. And a little bit of correction. This piece doesn't move like this. That's an illegal move, etc. So, this guy is full of There is actually, it's diverse perspectives don't actually matter. There is a true game of baseball and it doesn't matter what a Chinese woman from the border of Mongolia thinks about it. What matters is that she can actually learn the
• 53:30 - 54:00 reality of a game of baseball. Right now, when I bring up the baseball bat earlier, it's just a much simpler physical object. There is no question though. He says that the backgrounds and expectations of the observer shape perception. Yeah. So, he just put a spell on you. So, now you're convinced that your perception is based on your background, which you've now lost the whole point. That's how magic spells work. This is a grimmoire, a magic spell book that puts the spell on you as you read it. And so, by the way, telling people to read grimoirs is actually not
• 54:00 - 54:30 advised most of the time. I do think people should read read original sources, but you will get sucked into them if you don't know what you're reading and you don't know why it's um at least constructed to pull you in, but ideally uh how it's constructed to pull you in and in fact where its errors are or to some degree where its errors are. It says, "Consider now how a classroom is perceived by a class clown, a traditionally good student, a burnout teacher, a standardized test maker, an
• 54:30 - 55:00 anti-standards activist, a bureaucratic supervisor, a disgruntled parent, a nostalgic alumnus, or a student with feelings similar to the shooters Eric and Dylan from Coline High School." Adding that emotional point at the end is part of how it works, by the way. But he says, "Imagine what a classroom looks like to each of those things." Okay. So, yeah, they had the idea of using classrooms differently in different circumstances, but there's still an underlying point that the
• 55:00 - 55:30 classroom exists to gather people together for a particular reason, which is education. And you might disagree on how the education is supposed to uh proceed. When you add in the school shooters, they are obviously not using the classroom for its purposes. And I I don't have to digress. The way our psychosocial dispositions shape how the world is perceived holds important implications for teaching and critical thinking. Now, pause. He just gave that huge list, whether it's the baseball game or the classroom, right, of different perspectives. What was his
• 55:30 - 56:00 point? Let's not lose his point. His point was that the classroom is fundamentally a different thing for all of those different people with all of their different perspectives. It is fundamentally a different object. And again, I I'm telling you this is not true. This is actually a terrible way to think the world works. Each of our students, he says, brings a unique disposition into the classroom. Indeed, each teacher carries a unique disposition with her or him. In
• 56:00 - 56:30 this theoretical context, students of constructivism might ask, "How are our constructions of the world shaped?" And of course the answer is through historical contingency aka political power, economic status, social status and so on. Are our psycho psychosocial dispositions beyond our conscious control? Do we simply surrender our perceptions to the determinations of our
• 56:30 - 57:00 environment, our social cultural context? So the Marxist view is that if you are unconscious then yes and when you wake up to Marxism finally no and you gain agency by becoming a Marxist kind of ironically. And finally what does this process of construction have to do with becoming an educated person? Their answer is you're not educated until you're awake to a constructivist view because you're false consciousness. So you were falsely educated because
• 57:00 - 57:30 people are often unable to discern the ways that the that their environments shape their perception. So again, cult mindset, we're better than you. That is uh how they construct their consciousnesses. So that's an important point. Let's read that again. Because people are often unable to discern the ways their environments shape their perception, which is to say construct their consciousness. The development of modes of analysis that expose this complex process becomes
• 57:30 - 58:00 very important in our critical constructivist effort. So that's the woke part of woke up or of of woke is to wake people up to that. This is where the term critical merges with constructivism to form critical constructivism. Thus we understand the origin of our term critical constructivism. Critical theory is connected sorry concerned critical theory is concerned with extending a human's consciousness of himself or herself as a social being in light of
• 58:00 - 58:30 the way dominant power operates to manage knowledge. Let's hear it again. That's important. Critical theory is concerned with extending a human's consciousness of himself or herself as a social being in light of the way dominant power operates to manage knowledge. So here there's those three criteria. A critical theoretical analyst who gains such a
• 58:30 - 59:00 consciousness would understand how his or her political opinions, religious beliefs, gender role, racial self-concept or view of the goals of education had been influenced by both the dominant culture and subcultures. Imagine if you believe that your political and religious views in say conservative Christianity were shaped by dominant power structures like the post-war liberal consensus. Wouldn't you be woke? You would be woke. What if you
• 59:00 - 59:30 were critical of that using critical theory methodologies? Wouldn't you be woke? You would be woke. Woke right's a great term. Critical constructivism thus promotes reflection on the production of self. It's a religion, guys. Let's take out the fancy word and put in the simple word. Woke thus promotes reflection on the production of self. The whole point of whether it's Marxism or woke or whatever is to answer the question, who am I in a very deep way? And in fact, I
• 59:30 - 60:00 am somebody who produces myself. How do I do that? Well, I do that by identifying the dominant power structures and rejecting them. That's the answer. In many of the undergraduate teacher education courses I've taught over the last few decades, I have attempted to help students cultivate a critical theoretically grounded view of the construction of their own consciousness as a perspective teacher. Remember your consciousness is a result of your conditions. But your
• 60:00 - 60:30 consciousness is what shapes your perception and your perception defines your reality. So he's asking people to redefine their consciousness which will redefine their perceptions which will redefine reality for them. This is crazy pants. This is this is a magical religious belief that operates like a cult. Why is it he asks why is it that I have decided to teach? What forces in my life shaped this decision? How will these forces uh
• 60:30 - 61:00 sorry, how have these forces contributed to the type of teacher I will become? If you wonder why so many activists are teachers now and so many teachers become activists, those questions being taught as part of their core curriculum is a lot of why. They're being taught to look at structural forces as the motivation for their teaching and how they're going to do it. These questions, he says, and many others, combined with an introduction to critical theory, initiate an introspective process that eventuates in
• 61:00 - 61:30 not only self-nowledge, but also in cultural and educational critique. A as critical constructivist teachers study major issues in education, the students are analyzing themselves and the origins of their ways of making sense of the world. Remember, how you make sense of the world defines your world in the constructivist program. The interreationship of these parallel studies produces some interesting perspectives as students
• 61:30 - 62:00 come to see various school purposes and reform movements play out on the terrain of their own school lives. Students come to know themselves better by using these critical theoretical insights to bring consciousness to the process by which their consciousness was constructed. Sounds Buddhist. Action to correct what might be viewed as harmful constructions can be negotiated once reflection reveals the psychological, ethical, moral, and
• 62:00 - 62:30 political foundations of the pathology. So if you don't think like they do or like they want with regard to dominant power structures, you have a pathology and you can learn to reshape yourself around that pathology. This is cult thinking. The notion of critical constructivism allows teachers and students a critical consciousness. This involves an ability to step back from the world as we are accustomed to perceiving it and to see the ways our perception is constructed
• 62:30 - 63:00 via linguistic codes. That is conspiracy theories. By the way, via linguistic codes, cultural signs, race, class, gender, and sexual ideologies. He doesn't list the post-war liberal consensus or global homo or any of that, but we could. And often other hidden modes of power. Such ability constitutes a giant step in becoming a critical analyst, learning to be an emancipatory teacher
• 63:00 - 63:30 in assuming the role of a producer of dangerous worldchanging knowledge. Critical constructivism thus is a theoretically grounded form of worldmaking. What is woke? Woke is therefore a theoretically grounded form of world making. Let it sink in what these people are doing, what they see about themselves. We ask penetrating questions. How did that which has come
• 63:30 - 64:00 to be come to be? Did the Jews arrange everything after World War II to make sure never again? Did the conservative movement in the United States, following Barry Goldwaterat's lead, exclude all of the racists and fascists, aka true conservatives? How did the world come to be the way that it is? Whose interests do particular institutional arrangements serve? Is it global homo? I'm going to keep using the woke right terms for these things. Is it the cuck libtards? Is it the neocons who have structured
• 64:00 - 64:30 their whole reality? Wilr's a great term for these people, by the way. As critical constructivists remake and rename their world, you ever talk to these people left or right? They speak in this weird cult language. They accuse you of things like wanting to go back to 1995 as though everything could just be reset to 1995 liberalism and everything would be great. P.S. 1995 was great. Um but anyway, how did that which has come to be come to be? Whose interests do
• 64:30 - 65:00 particular institutional arrangements serve? As critical constructivists remake and rename their world, they are constantly guided by their critical theoretical system of meaning, their emancipatory source of authority. Emancipatory, they think they're in prison. They're gnostics. They think they're in prison. So they have a source of authority that's granted to them by being aware of their imprisonment. That's their emancipatory source of authority, which is their critical system, critical theorybased system of
• 65:00 - 65:30 meaning making. He recommends seeing another of his wonderful books in the Peter Lang primer series, Critical Pedigogy, for more on that topic. Teachers, he says, with access to critical constructivist theory, for example, are empowered to ask typically neglected questions about the socopolitical purposes of schooling. In a critical theoretical context, they can more clearly discern how education operates to reproduce or challenge
• 65:30 - 66:00 dominant socopolitical and economic structures. Woke left and woke right both do this. Such theoretical understandings are profoundly important in learning to think, teach, and live democratically. Educational purpose cannot be separated from social justice, human liberation, self-direction, resistance to regulation, community building, deeper forms of human human interconnection, and the fight for
• 66:00 - 66:30 freedom. Freedom from what? Freedom from reality. Think I might have bookmarked way too much of this book. We'll see though. When educators fail to gain these theoretical frames, schools inexurably become sorting machines for the new corporate order. Without such informed modes of making meaning, schools tend to reinforce patriarchal structures. Eurosentric educational practices, homophobia, and racism. The struggle for
• 66:30 - 67:00 the soul of education in North America is playing out on the road before us. Critical constructivism helps us understand the way that dominant power wielders have worked to create an educational system that benefits the most privileged at the expense of those marginalized by race, class, gender, and sexuality. which again to which we might add global homo, neocons, libs, whatever slang terms they want to use,
• 67:00 - 67:30 uh, post-war liberal consensus, the Jews that the woke right also invoke at this point. So, what I'm going to do actually was I was going to continue, but I think I have way too much material um, but set aside for this particular episode. So, what I'm going to do is break this here and I'll make another episode or two to finish this part that uh of the chapter 1 and maybe I'll just continue going through this book and we'll do a long series on the book of woke. Um, but I
• 67:30 - 68:00 like that this is a little over an hour and I don't want to drag this out and I think it's going to be very long if I continue. So, I'm going to break this here and we will come back soon with another episode going further through the book of woke um which I think you will continue to find edifying. not just in understanding how woke actually thinks in its own words, how it teaches in its own words, and but also how it applies to what I've called the woke right. Now, just as a quick wrap-up, just want to remind you what we covered.
• 68:00 - 68:30 Woke means critical constructivism. Critical constructivism means critical theory applied through a constructivist worldview. A constructivist worldview means that you think the world is constructed by power. It's a social phenomenon. As a matter of fact, you think that your perception of reality defines reality. He said explicitly, there is no reality. Nothing exists before it is before consciousness makes
• 68:30 - 69:00 it perceptible. So how you perceive is how it is. That's the derivative of your truth and my truth. The critical theory part adds in that you're going to see that through dominant power structures and as we know and we can add these dominant power structures are located in because this is all Marxist derivative they are all located in what we would call class identities whether it's economic class racial class social class cultural class
• 69:00 - 69:30 identities define the power structures. So, the rub that we haven't got to yet, and I'll just say it here, and I don't know if and when he says it at this point, the rub is, like I said, they deny uh what they say is that every individual has their own reality, their own subjective reality. Reality exists subjectively, therefore, in each individual. How do you make something coherent out of that? What the claim in woke is is that when you look at these power
• 69:30 - 70:00 structures, the power structures are defined from one class onto another. That's always class conflict. And the imposition of power from the dominant class onto the oppressed class creates a social location shared in common by all people who are in that subjective um oppression space. So people who are oppressed will have similarities in their subjective consciousness of the world because they're subjectively
• 70:00 - 70:30 experiencing the same oppression or similar oppression. So this is where you get the identity politics aspect of woke. It is that individually every single person has a reality and experience of reality. Actually they have a reality that is dictated by their experience of reality which is contoured by political and social and cultural power that they experience. But the nature of that power is oppressor class imposing it upon an
• 70:30 - 71:00 oppressed class who then share it in common. That's why group identity becomes the locust of meaning for the woke. You can claim that it's about freedom and individuality and all of this and that each person has an incommensurate reality then there's no shared world or reality to which we can appeal to answer questions or resolve disputes say through evidence. You can say that but the fact is that they believe further that the power dynamics
• 71:00 - 71:30 and this is a critical theory part. The power dynamics attached to that constructivist worldview make the classes the identity groups meaningful and because they have a shared subjective experience of oppression. Markx was clear that the shared subjective experience of oppression grants all the workers something in common which he identified when it's on the right side of things as class consciousness. To fail to have the
• 71:30 - 72:00 consciousness of your class is to have a false consciousness. If you are in an oppressed class, you are supposed to have the consciousness of oppression and therefore you're supposed to have the ability to understand oppression and fight it. If you are in an oppressor class, you are also supposed to be awakened to your class consciousness. To understand that you are in an oppressor class who needs to stand down, who needs to feel guilt and shame. They'll say that you don't, but of course you do. And stand down so that the oppressed will no longer be oppressed by your
• 72:00 - 72:30 oppressive actions, which might be not oppressive at all. Might be just not taking up the the uh mantle of their totalitarian ideology. The other thing that we picked up is that this is a worldview. It is a woke is a worldview. It is a therefore cult mindset. Avelton schwang that binds and orients other schools of philosophical thought like the theory of being and ontology. The theory of knowledge and epistemology. A
• 72:30 - 73:00 theory of values is called axiology. Sociology we understand. Psychology. Theories of cognition he named pedagogy. So theories of teaching, what teaching is for and how it's to be done. We could go down the list. The idea is that this critical constructivism or woke binds and orients all those other schools of philosophical thought. In other words, it in some sense subdues them. Your ontology has to be uh understood as because nothing
• 73:00 - 73:30 exists before your perception of it which is shaped by your consciousness which is shaped by political power which is determined by your historical conditions. That line, that's an ontological statement that your ontology, how you believe the world exists and how you exist in the world, all has to be brought to heal to the critical constructivist metaphilosophy and schwang worldview. So, we're dealing with something that operates meaningfully as a religion. Uh, I again assert that it's a cult. And the
• 73:30 - 74:00 reason it's a cult religion is specifically because, and we haven't covered this, but it is a closed system. You can't disagree with You can't disagree with it. If you disagree, if like we went out and found evidence that a claim from critical constructivism is true, they would claim that evidence and say, "See, we're right." But if we went out and gathered evidence and it disproved a claim made by critical constructivists, they would
• 74:00 - 74:30 say that's an unjust application of political power and therefore is not valid. And so it's it it's a it's not just not falsifiable. It's it's completely um epistemically closed. It has absolutely no way that you can break through, get in or or change the mind of the meta system. And so it's a cult ideology uh or a cult worldview as well. So we know it's a worldview. We know that they believe in an anti-realist
• 74:30 - 75:00 philosophy that we construct subjectively our world but that the binding of that is located in identity because identity groups are classes and because classes are in intrinsic Marxist conflict with one another that therefore an oppressor imposes a class identity and class experience on the oppressed and has its own class experience and class identity and that those are constitutive of who people see themselves to be, how they perceive the
• 75:00 - 75:30 world, and thus what reality is for them. That's woke. Plus the understanding with critical theory that these dominant power structures need to be overthrown. And what we get there at the end of the day from all this, it's the last thing I'll say is with the woke, what you end up with in practice is that the woke people are the ones who have to run everything because they're, as they said, the only ones who actually understand it. Again, a signature of the cult nature of this uh worldview is that everybody who disagrees with their
• 75:30 - 76:00 consciousness is just unaware of the deeper levels of consciousness out there. They have a false consciousness about reality. They haven't fully woken up yet. So, they can't understand. So, they don't have what did he call it? Emancipatory authority. They don't have authority to speak or more importantly to rule. So, these poor people, painful as it might be for them, are just going to have to rule over all of us because they understand and we don't. That's again a Gnostic cult. So this is our introduction to the book of woke. We will do more podcasts on this because I
• 76:00 - 76:30 had way too much material like usual. And um maybe we'll make our way through much of the book. It's really tedious like this though. And we only covered a few pages. You can get the idea. So come back next time. We'll talk more about the book of woke. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Heat. Heat.
• 76:30 - 77:00 [Music]