Hey, everybody. This is James Lindsay. You are listening to the New Discourses podcast, and we are back in the book of woke. So what is the book of woke? Let me explain that real quick again. We're a few episodes into this kind of sparse series. The book of woke is the nickname that I have given for a long time now many years,

going back to well before even St. George Floyd managed to get himself killed. It is a book

called Critical Constructivism, A Primer by Joe Kinchelow. Now, this book is a rare book. It is hard to get a hold of.

And so I knew this book existed and called it the book of woke long before I was able to read it.

And so now I have a copy thanks to our friend Logan Lansing, who managed to dig one up.

And I kind of have it on, we'll call it permanent loan.

I will definitely give it back to him at some point.

But at any rate, I have this book now, and I have read it, and I've read some of it more than once, and it's a doozy.

And we've read from it before.

I call it the book of Woke.

The title of the book is very technical, critical

constructivism. A primer tells you that he's introducing the concept. Joe Kinchelow was a critical

pedagogue that is a critical education theorist. He worked most of his career at McGill University,

if I'm not mistaken, in Canada. And critical constructivism is his articulation

of the worldview that he taught, that he thought critical pedagogy springs from, that critical

pedagogy, in fact, seeks to instill in learners. In my opinion, when you read the tenets of critical constructivism,

as I did for the first time, maybe as early as 2016 or 2017 on the Wikipedia, you start to

realize very quickly that this is a clear summary of what we call woke. So if we're defining woke as I usually do in the broad sense,

there's a lot more to it, and it includes a lot more things, including Marxism, classically,

fascism on the so-called right and some other things. But if you're defining woke in the narrow

sense, as in this thing that has seemed to erupt in the past 10 years

out of what we called political correctness culture or whatever academic leftism. This is what we're talking about. This book was published in 2005.

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