School dazed: Mask arguments an embarrassment with no end
Embarrassingly enough, in Allegheny County, home to some of the top universities and research hospitals in the world, about a third of the local school districts will NOT require masks in classrooms as the new academic year begins.
COVID-19 cases are through the roof around here, with cases among children up substantially, frightfully. Thus the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Pennsylvania Department of Health all strongly recommend masks for everyone working in or near the school building and for all students, so what is the issue?
Are we waiting for the Proud Boys to say “Mask up!”
Freedom, oh freedom; that’s the issue? Sorry, that’s settled law. There is no freedom to make people sick. There is no right to run red lights.
The case, should anyone be persuadable ( hahahahaha!) came before the Supreme Court more than a century ago when a Massachusetts pastor, one Henning Jacobson, refused to be vaccinated against smallpox in accordance with state law. In a 7-2 decision with Justice John Marshall Harlan writing for the majority, the court ruled that “in every well-ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members, the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand“and that “real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own [liberty], whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”
In other words and to restate it, there is no right to run red lights, but we’re blowing through them blindly all over the state.
At North Allegheny, where the school board is perfectly willing to sabotage the superintendent, the parents, the teachers and the students with the kind of procedural chicanery that got it slapped with an injunction Monday, making masks mandatory at least for the moment, mindless hand-wringing will almost certainly continue.
Bethel Park’s board reversed itself that night, making masks mandatory even as someone in attendance yelled “Nazis.” Simultaneously, Seneca Valley’s board voted to require masks when Butler County got “substantial” or “high” transmission rates as defined by the CDC, like now, but I don’t think they needed to put that fine a point on it.
These three schools got it right, again, momentarily, because we’re talking about the safety and perhaps the very lives of people in an enclosed space for hours on end, more than half of whom have not been vaccinated, most because they are too young but many because they are too misinformed, dis-informed or mal-informed to know truth from fiction.
That still leaves at least a dozen school districts in Allegheny County with no mask mandates for students. Perhaps they’re confused by Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration “strongly encouraging” masks rather than mandating them, but seriously, isn’t school supposed to be where the smart people are?
That’s why people go to school. To get the facts that are the raw material of truth, to learn to think critically, to develop the skills necessary not only to become responsible members of American society, but the skills necessary to separate sense from nonsense. If school administrators, the alleged adults, can’t exemplify the same critical thinking, shame on them.
And you thought this wasn’t Alabama or Arkansas or Mississippi or, even worse, one of the COVID furnaces led by feckless political hack governors, Florida and Texas. But how different is it?
At the largest university in the state, according to the PostGazette’s Bill Schackner, hundreds of faculty are conducting Zoom classes to protest Penn State’s refusal to require masks for students in its classrooms. This comes a week after its athletic director said masks would not be required in Beaver Stadium, where 100,000 people sit on each others’ laps on fall Saturdays. At Penn State, you might assume administrators would be smarter than your local school board, and you would be wrong. PSU is petrified the Republicandominated state Legislature will threaten to pull its funding if it looks too “woke” on the science of epidemiology.
It reminds me of what Dr. Thomas Frieden, former CDC director and Commissioner of the New York City Health Department said last summer: “It seems that some are more intent on fighting imagined enemies than the real enemy here, which is the virus. The virus doesn’t read talking points. The virus doesn’t watch news shows. The virus just waits for us to make mistakes. And when we make mistakes, as Texas and Florida and Arizona and South Carolina did, the virus wins. When we ignore science, the virus wins.”
Schools are supposed to teach science, not ignore it. Education policy has been a topic of fierce debate for centuries, but if you had to grade it in the moment, American education has produced on balance a citizenry that, in its hour of greatest need, can’t get out of its own way.