Forcing pupils to wear masks is not only wrong but foolish

When something must be done, it’s important to pause and think before acting. For example, do we want school children existing in a permanent state of anxiety and discomfort five days a week because politicians want to be seen to be doing something.

The potential mental health implications for forcing children to wear masks all day every day at school, combined with a rather tenuous case in favour of the policy providing significant benefit, should lead to this policy being dropped. 

The Times has today reported that the study used to justify the introduction of masks in English schools implied that they had, at best, a marginal effect. This is according to documents released by the Department for Education. That’s right, the government’s own research failed to find that masks had a significant effect in lowering transmission, but they’re doing it anyway and children be damned! 

This correlates with findings from the USA, data collected by the COVID-19 School Response Dashboard  found that schools and school districts without mask mandates had lower case rates than schools with mandates. There are a myriad of factors and differentials that may have contributed to this apparent anomaly, but it sure doesn’t make for a convincing case to mask children every day. 

Face masks are designed to be worn in hospital and clinical settings mainly, and when necessary other enclosed public spaces, to prevent saliva droplets from landing on other people and infecting them, with Covid. However, for school pupils to wear masks six to seven hours a day, five days a week is a demand too far. Along with the constant reminders of the ongoing pandemic, the risks of infection and warning about hygiene, we are risking causing anxiety and mental health problems in our children. 

In any case, how healthy can it really be to wear a mask all day meaning that instead of the body expelling other bacteria and viruses they are simply inhaling them again or their exhalation waste settles in a moist environment behind their mask? This is exacerbated by the use of cloth masks, flimsy fake ‘surgical’ style masks and the overusing of single masks before cleaning.

Of course, Twitter is awash with Little Miss Prissy mummies, and know-it-all Mr Smug dads saying how their little darlings are complying with no problem at all because they understand the reasons why and they are so incredible and selfless. Fine, far be it from me to question the significance of anecdotal evidence from self-satisfied, middle class social media moralisers, but I do wonder whether they’ve really given the subject that much thought. 

Think about how likely children are to not wear their masks properly, to fiddle with them, to take them off and put them back on repeatedly, to contaminate their masks thereby making the whole thing pointless. Expecting children to wear masks properly and comply with this absurd ruling every school day is optimistic at best and downright stupid at worst. 

It makes communication (rather important in the school setting) more difficult; school children will be less able to rely on and respond to facial cues from their teachers and fellow pupils. Teachers will find it harder to read the reactions of their classes. Masks are detrimental to human interaction, and this is serious issue in a school setting in a way that it simply isn’t in a supermarket. 

We can be certain that plenty of the smug advocates of masking children are not sending their kids to state schools, attended by many pupils with behavioural issues that struggle to obey the normal rules, wear uniforms and often come from backgrounds of poverty and/or neglect. Will they comply? Will teachers spend less time teaching as they try to enforce mask wearing on these children? Does this come into the consideration of privately educated political decision makers and scientific advisers? Is the smug Twitter brigade considering them? Of course not. 

On this one, I’m with renowned children’s author Julia Donaldson who believes forcing pupils to wear facemasks in the classroom is dystopian:

“Even if the current proposals are only for three weeks, this could be repeated and become something considered normal whenever there is infection, whereas in fact it should not be considered normal, it is alien — even dystopian […] Children are children for such a short time, I don’t think they should be sacrificed like this.”

“(Masks) are seen as a gesture that isn’t costing the government any money and as something that is not doing any harm. Because of the climate of fear, people have readily accepted something I regard as unacceptable, and that I fear may now be seen as a normal part of life.”

Hear, hear! This is not another left/right issue. Not everything has to be another front in the culture war. We have to balance real-life factors against the advice of scientists, and forcing children to wear masks every day is a bad policy that will do more harm than good.