Seventh Graders Unmask!

But many students in grades K-6 do not

Students smiled as they shuffled into homeroom.

“This is weird.”

“I kind of feel awkward.”

Several maskless seventh graders remarked on the “strangeness” of not having to “mask-up” before walking into the classroom. Some wore masks as they entered, saw a friendly face, and removed their face covering.

Positive peer pressure.

The first day my school had a mask optional policy, exactly 90% of my seventh graders chose to breath freely, by far the highest percentage of maskless students in the building. I had a positive influence on this outcome, since I leveled with my students all year long about the unscientific nature of the mask policy, how masks do not prevent the spread of viruses, and how they take away from our ability to meaningfully interact with each other in the classroom.

Eighth grade took second place: between 60% and 70% of students decided not to wear a mask. Kindergarten through grade six had more kids in masks than the seventh and eighth grades. Slightly over 50% of K-6 students did not cover their faces on day one of the mask optional policy. That number remained the same throughout the week, perhaps because several teachers of these grades still wear a mask.

At my school, and throughout America, masked teachers in mask optional schools encourage their students to act in a pandemic charade.

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I assume, though, some parents still genuinely fear Covid, and that’s why they send their children to school with a mask. These parents remain ignorant of the data, and the fact that this disease never posed a threat to their children. Not in March of 2020, and certainly not in March of 2022.

An original investigation published in JAMA Pediatrics on May 11, 2020 concluded that “…data indicate[s] that children are at far greater risk of critical illness from influenza than from COVID-19.” Furthermore, Sweden never shut down its schools at any point during the pandemic, and they never mandated masks. During the first four months of international pandemic hysteria (March-June 2020) this Nordic nation did not witness a single Covid death out of its 1.95 million children ages 1-16, and only 1 child in 130,000 needed intensive care as they kept schools open and faces free.

And recent data reinforces what we have known for two years about Covid and its risk to children. A research letter published on February 21, 2022 in JAMA Pediatrics showed that children have a higher rate of hospital admission when infected with influenza than when infected with SARS-CoV-2, even when combined with multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MISC-C), a sequelae of Covid-19.

When looking at the hospital admissions of children aged 5-11 from SARS-CoV-2, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), the authors of this letter compared January-March of 2021 to the same time period in 2017, “because diagnoses of influenza and RSV were rare during the COVID-19 pandemic.” They chose the “first quarter of 2017…when influenza was at its mean 10-year level,” which allowed for a proper comparison.

The authors observed that “combined, COVID-19 and MIS-C hospitalizations occurred at a rate of 10.8 per 100, 000 children…but in 2017, influenza and RSV had 17.0 and 6.2 hospitalizations per 100 ,000, respectively.”

Furthermore, a large German study showed that not one healthy child or adolescent between the ages of 5-18 died from Covid-19 during the first fifteen months of the pandemic. Healthy children aged 5-11 had only a 1 in 50,000 chance of ending up in the intensive care unit in Germany. This age cohort makes up students in grades K-6, the grade levels at my school that has the most masked students.

Maybe some neurotic parents know the infinitesimal risk that Covid poses to children, but they still want their child to “mask-up” anyway. Wearing a mask, though, may actually make a child more susceptible to infection.

A new extensive study from Catalonia monitored Covid infections in Catalonian schools, where children aged six and older had to wear a mask, but five and under did not. The researchers note that “with no mandatory use of FCM [face covering masks], the youngest children have significantly lower transmission indicators when compared with any other year group,” and that mask “mandates in schools were not associated to a lower SARS-CoV-2 incidence.” One can conclude that wearing a mask may actually raise a child’s risk of becoming infected after observing this study. This may be especially true if they wear a cloth mask, since a 2015 paper published in the British Medical Journal compared health care workers who wore medical masks to those who wore cloths masks and found that “moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection.”

So, not only do masks not work at preventing infection from viruses, they may actually increase the risk of becoming infected. Fortunately, though, Covid-19 poses less of a threat to children than annual influenza. Now it’s time for propagandized parents to wake up to the fact that masks can harm their children both physiologically and, in many cases, psychologically.

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I teach a philosophy class twice a week, an elective offered to students in grades 6-8. On Wednesday of last week - the third day of my school’s mask optional policy - an unmasked sixth-grader folded paper airplanes and made origami while I showed the class a documentary film on the Roman Stoic, Seneca. I redirected his focus, and he apologized for not paying attention.

Then, he put on a surgical mask.

I said to this student, “you didn’t wear mask for the first twenty-minutes of class, so why do you want to wear one now all of a sudden?”

He diverted his eyes, nervously rocked back and forth in his chair, and said quietly, “I put it on when I do something wrong.”

“Buddy,” I said, “you do not need to wear that mask. I’m not upset with you. And, regardless, you shouldn’t wear a mask anyway. It’s not necessary.”

This child hid his face behind a mask because he felt anxious and ashamed. His mask functioned as a psychological crutch as it covered his countenance. He kept it on for another minute or two before taking it off.

The film on Seneca continued. It discussed anger, what the Stoic philosopher referred to as a “temporary madness.” I did not feel even the slightest bit of anger at this student for daydreaming and making paper airplanes and origami. However, I must admit I felt indignant towards those who forced children to wear a mask for two years, and who now want to normalize this malignant practice by giving them the option to hide their face.

Because, ultimately, conscientious and caring parents - and teachers - must not allow children to adapt any further to the pernicious pathology of mask wearing, and that means encouraging them to never hide their face again.