Kincheloe’s middle triad (points 7–9) turns decisively to power. For him, knowledge is not a neutral enterprise but one thoroughly saturated by hierarchies and privilege. These assumptions illuminate why woke ideology so often revolves around suspicion of institutions, rejection of expertise, and elevation of subjective testimony.

7. Power saturates knowledge.
Kincheloe emphasizes that knowledge is “always shaped by the interests of those in positions of authority.”¹ This axiom fuels the woke suspicion that all institutions—media, medicine, law—are corrupt vehicles of domination. Cancel culture emerges naturally from this premise: deplatforming or boycotts are justified as dismantling oppressive structures, not as punitive measures.

8. Rejection of the “banking” model.
Borrowing from Paulo Freire, Kincheloe denounces the view of education as “depositing” knowledge from experts into passive students.² Authority itself becomes suspect. In contemporary woke practice, expertise is dismissed as patriarchal or hegemonic; the testimony of lived experience is elevated over professional judgment. This democratizing veneer conceals a broader anti-meritocratic impulse.

9. Knowledge at the intersection of the personal and the academic.
Kincheloe advocates a synthesis of scholarly inquiry and personal experience.³ The result is the infusion of trauma narratives into public debate, the adoption of therapeutic language in politics, and the privileging of anecdote over statistical analysis. This personalization of knowledge fragments discourse into individual perspectives that resist reconciliation.

Synthesis.
Kincheloe’s power-centered principles explain the characteristic features of woke discourse: perpetual suspicion of institutions, rejection of expertise, and valorization of subjective experience. These tendencies transform disagreement into oppression and render consensus increasingly unattainable.

Notes

  1. Kincheloe, Critical Constructivism Primer, 10–11.

  2. Ibid., 12.

  3. Ibid., 13.