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February 20, 2023

An Arizona teacher claims her credentials mean she outranks parents

By Andrea Widburg

Before women’s lib, America’s teachers were often the best and brightest women in a college class because teaching was one of their few career options. Since women’s lib, the women who achieve academically usually choose majors other than teaching. Teachers today tend to fall into two categories: (1) A small number of men and women (usually conservative) with a real passion for education and (2) insecure, narcissistic people who struggle academically and look to a room full of helpless children to validate their ideology and sexuality. Alicia Messing, an Arizona educator, definitely falls in the second category.

Messing came to our attention because she testified before the Arizona Senate Education Committee to protest Arizona bill SB 1700, which will amend Arizona’s existing education laws to give parents the right to review and, through a defined procedure, to seek to remove inappropriate books from libraries and classrooms, especially books that promote non-traditional sexual and gender roles or that normalize pedophilia. Incidentally, as little as twenty years ago, this kind of thing went without saying. Now, thanks to leftist incursions in education, it’s a fight.

And in the frontline of the battle to preserve teachers’ rights to inundate children with inappropriate material stands Alicia Messing, the proud holder of a Masters’s degree in education. Messing believes that this degree gave her superpowers that raised her to a degree of enlightenment that, in her own mind, must go unchallenged, especially by those brutish troglodytes known as parents. She didn’t say that explicitly but she sure said it implicitly:

I have a Master’s degree because, when I got certified, I was told I have to have a Master’s degree to be an Arizona certified teacher. We all have advanced degrees. What do the parents have? Are we vetting the background of our parents? Are we allowing the parents to choose the curriculum and the books that our children are going to read? I think that it’s a mistake—and I’m just speaking from the heart—the one line that I love is “We must remember that the purpose of public education is not to teach only what parents want their children to be taught; it is to teach them what society needs them to be taught.”

Wow! The arrogance! And that overriding, almost religious reverence for credentialism. It’s breathtaking. That woman lives on your money and hates you for it.

That woman and all those like her have no long-term commitment to the children who pass through their classrooms. They have them for a quarter, a semester, or a year. And then, having poisoned the child’s mind, they’re done. Parents, on the other hand, have a lifetime commitment to their children. They love them and work daily to help their children to grow into happy, productive, self-sufficient people. That means the hard grunt work of raising a child, as well as the fact that parents turn over most of their income, in one form or another, to their children.

For generations, American parents entrusted their children to a public school system because they believed the schools would teach their children the reading, writing, and arithmetic needed to function in a modern world; the civics that would allow them to be good citizens; and the attendant studies—history, literature, art, music, languages—that would enable them to become well-rounded people. For the most part, until the 1960s hit and the world went mad, schools taught this curriculum, with some schools doing a better job than others.

This all ended in the 1960s. First, as noted, women began to have greater career opportunities, so the pool of top-flight women to be teachers diminished. Second, leftist ideology entered colleges and, through them, trickled into the K-12 classroom. The new generation of teachers, who too often struggled academically, found it a great relief to use their classrooms to preach about race and sexuality—easy emotional topics—rather than to slog through math and grammar lessons.

As for the credentialism, two of the best attacks on credentialism emerged from Hollywood, of all places, in the 1980s. The first is the clash between Rodney Dangerfield and a business professor in Back to School:

The second is seen in the original Ghostbusters, when the main characters, all with Ph.Ds., have been fired and must return to the private sector (the two videos together comprise the entire scene):

People on Twitter had some excellent comments in response to Messing’s arrogance, which deserve to be shared:

Too many American public school teachers are dangerous people who are immured in their ignorance, arrogance, and (for them) validating leftist ideology. They are a danger to the helpless children consigned to their care.

Image: Alicia Messing. Twitter screen grab.

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