Teacher: I Won’t Force Kids to Wear Masks & I Won’t Wear One Either
Teacher: I Won’t Force Kids to Wear Masks & I Won’t Wear One Either
by Richie Allen
February 24, 2021
The Telegraph newspaper, to its credit, has published an opinion piece by a secondary school teacher who is based in Essex. The teacher believes that forcing kids to wear masks in the classroom is “Dystopian and abhorrent.”
The teacher has been reading “The Handmaid’s Tale with Year 11’s and described a class full of masked children as “like something out of Gilead.” Expressing concern that masks would make it seem to youngsters that schools are not safe when they desperately need some normality the teacher wrote:
They are already being flooded with messages in the media and the outside world which fill them with fear on a daily basis. The government’s whole campaign is built on fear and children have absorbed that. They have also faced a year of disruption to their learning and been kept apart from their friends. What sort of message does it send to them if we then make them wear a mask in the classroom too?
As well as being physically uncomfortable, it’s going to be almost impossible for them to communicate with me as their teacher. It will have a detrimental impact on their confidence, make them even more reluctant to put their hand up in class to ask questions and engage in the lesson. Many of them, especially those who were already struggling, have fallen massively behind during lockdown and will find it difficult or even impossible to catch up.
I’ve also seen very little evidence to suggest that masks are effective anyway. I am cynical about this idea of asymptomatic transmission. Schools aren’t necessarily the cleanest places in the world but children are meant to be exposed to a few germs to build up their immune systems.
The teacher is absolutely right. It’s dystopian and disturbing in the extreme. Of course it will unsettle children but it will also do them serious harm. Wearing masks for eight hours a day may have a seriously detrimental effect on their physical health. Dozens of studies have found that masks make breathing more difficult, especially for children.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that:
inhaling high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) may be life-threatening. Hypercapnia (carbon dioxide toxicity) can also cause headache, vertigo, double vision, inability to concentrate, tinnitus (hearing a noise, like a ringing or buzzing, that’s not caused by an outside source), seizures, or suffocation due to displacement of air.
Parents wise up and wise up fast. You must not allow your children be forced to wear a face covering when they return to the classroom.