must we construct?

[Terrance]

http://www.tncc.cc.va.us/faculty/longt/papers/Huxley_v_Arnold.html

Thirty years ago Wayne Booth posed the question, "Is there any knowledge
that a
man must have?" in an article ceaselessly reproduced in the Norton
Reader, an
anthology that accompanied my entry into the teaching of freshman
composition.
For many of today's baby-boomer professoriate Booth's article defined
the way we
positioned ourselves with respect to our divided subjectivity as both
graduate
students in literary study and as teaching assistants providing a
service course for
students in business, science, and technology curricula. Later it would
likewise
provide us with a professional justification for general education or
liberal arts
requirements in technical and occupational curricula, a particularly
pointed concern
for English faculty teaching at two-year colleges with
occupational/technical
emphases. Today's post-humanists and post-structuralists might reframe
Booth's
question: Are there any knowledges that a person must construct in order
to resist
the cultural dominance of hegemonic discourses? 

Although I am being mildly parodic in the formulation of that question,
I suspect
that both the humanist Booth and his post-humanist successors were
talking
explicitly about empowering students...

Are there any knowledges that a person
must construct in order to resist the cultural dominance of hegemonic
discourses?