In Critical Constructivism Primer (2005), Joe L. Kincheloe presents twelve guiding assumptions of what he calls “critical constructivism.” These principles together form an epistemological framework that treats knowledge as historically situated, socially mediated, and deeply entwined with power. In recent years, the same framework has informed what is now called “woke” ideology. This first essay examines Kincheloe’s opening three assumptions, which supply the philosophical foundation for that worldview.
1. Reality is socially constructed.
Kincheloe’s starting point is that reality is not encountered directly but always through interpretive lenses shaped by culture and history. “The knower and the known are interactive, engaged in a dialectical process” that makes empirical objectivity an illusion.¹ This insistence on mediation explains why woke discourse tends to prioritize interpretation over fact. History, science, or biology are not treated as neutral accounts of reality but as social artifacts built by dominant groups. The result is a cultural tendency to deconstruct established narratives and to elevate “lived experience” as more authentic than empirical observation.
2. Knowers are historically and socially situated.
Kincheloe argues that “all knowledge is shaped by the social and historical circumstances of the knower.”² This principle underwrites the now-common focus on “positionality” in public discourse. Individuals are asked to acknowledge privilege, confess bias, and defer to voices perceived as more marginalized. Far from being mere humility, this practice serves to undermine the possibility of universal reason. Disagreement is often interpreted as an assertion of dominance rather than a legitimate contribution to debate.
3. Knowledge and people are culturally forged.
Kincheloe’s third assumption is that both human beings and the knowledge they produce are “cultural constructions.”³ Identities are therefore understood as fluid, provisional, and malleable. From this vantage point, language becomes a tool for reshaping social reality itself. Terms such as “birthing person” are not semantic curiosities but deliberate efforts to reconstruct categories and, by extension, to remake the culture that relies upon them.
Synthesis.
These three assumptions establish the foundation of the woke worldview. They reject objective reality, insist that knowledge is inseparable from social position, and regard identity itself as a cultural artifact subject to reconstruction. What appears outwardly as a compassionate commitment to inclusion thus rests on an epistemology that empowers adherents to act as architects of reality. The consequences are profound: truth is no longer discovered but manufactured, and society is remade through the politics of construction.
Notes
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Joe L. Kincheloe, Critical Constructivism Primer (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005), 2.
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Ibid., 3.
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Ibid., 4–5.
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August 25, 2025 at 6:59 am
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This approach then allows confidence of belief to empower words to alter reality. Blatant racism, for example, becomes ‘anti-racism’ and so believers then exercise racist policies and practices and rationalize them as ‘fighting historical racism’.
This is why I have pointed out for decades that linguistic inversion is a Red Flag sign that we’re dealing with a kind of religious belief, an unrealistic ideology, that undermines and attacks respect for what’s independently true. That’s the only common ground we share, what’s independently true. Remove that, remove any need or persuasiveness for evidence. And without respecting compelling evidence from reality, we’re no longer dealing with anything other than extreme religious kind of belief immune from reality’s arbitration of its truth value.
So we get arguments by believers and then authoritarian policies from government and the court system, for example, that insist the magic words of a man turns him into a woman. And then rules and regulations and laws are formed to support this biological impossibility as if true because of those magic words and the legal and regulatory system used to impose it. Those who respect reality are then described as Bad People because by not believing they must be morally lacking bigots. This is why we hear the term ‘Kafkaesque’ referring to the fictional stories of social insanity when reality does not, and is not allowed to, play a role in defining reality by the author Kafka.
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