At UT-Austin, Teaching White 4-Year-Olds That They’re Racist is Funded By Taxpayer Dollars

After a brief pause, UT-Austin recently restarted the GoKar program, which develops critical race theory training materials for 4- and 5-year-olds who are white.

This $100,000 program, funded directly by university administration — and by extension taxpayer dollars — represents a grave misuse of state funds for political purposes.

The goal of the project is not to study racism or anything like that, but to develop materials to convince white preschool-aged children of the particular political views of researchers.

It is explicitly motivated by the ideas of Robin DiAngelo, who makes statements such as: “Raising white children to be white is a form of child abuse.”

Sadly, the faculty and administrators have successfully hidden behind a misunderstanding and abuse of the concept of academic freedom to defend the program and continue its funding without facing accountability for its content.

No one could seriously claim that this proposal would have been funded and defended if it were seeking to provide, say, patriotic education for preschoolers, under the pretense of measuring the effect of such a program on these attitudes.

And, imagine if such training were to be focused only on black preschool-aged children, a subset the researchers deemed deficient in patriotism.

Academic freedom is a great ideal, but academic freedom for only certain ideas is not academic freedom at all. The defense of this program as an exercise in academic freedom breaks down even further upon careful examination.

Here, with GoKar, the university actively chose to provide $100,000 of state money to engage in political persuasion aimed at 4- and 5-year-olds based on the claim that it would be too late to wait until they are adults, or even slightly more mature children, to get them to come around to the political views of the researchers.

GoKar is just one, though a particularly egregious, case of UT-Austin diverting money intended for the support of teaching and research to political activism.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/at-ut-austin-teaching-white-4-year-olds-that-theyre-racist-is-funded-by-taxpayer-dollars/