When Pink Floyd’s song “Another Brick in the Wall” was popular, I didn’t like it. The grammatical construction of the lyrics was aggressively wrong, and the whole thing struck me as a dangerous paean to ignorance. I never liked those kids who were “too cool for school.” In general, the song came across to me as a sign of cultural rot.
These days, I have a different view. The song was written in reference to primary school but these days, it’s a suitable anthem for college students.
In the Northeast of the United States, most elite colleges and universities have reimposed a mask mandate on all kids and teachers. True, compliance is spotty, but that has become an occasion for controversy. The presumption is that if you aren’t wearing your mask, you might be a dangerous political dissident or maybe even a dreaded anti-vaxxer, even a Trump supporter!
That’s how it goes these days: all symbols, no substance.
Of course, that isn’t the stated reason for the mandate. The supposed reason is to control the spread of COVID-19. Just the phrase makes me want to pull my hair out. It’s nuts. There is no controlling the spread. Obviously. It’s been almost three years now. COVID was already spreading everywhere long before ridiculous and evil governments decided to lock us all down.
Then they did this preposterous “track and trace” routine for another couple of years, as if anyone can really know for sure precisely from whom or what a respiratory virus is contracted. And even if you could know, what are you going to do then? It’s all just a big phony baloney excuse to control people’s lives.
The truth from the beginning is that everyone will get COVID, in seasonal waves, probably forever, developing immunity along the way, and that’s the end of the story. Period. There’s no point whatsoever in slowing the spread, flattening the curve, tracking and tracing, or anything else. It’s a germ. We live with them as endemic viruses.
And we all pretty much know that now. Except of course the Ivy League! All over New England now, fancy and expensive colleges have their classrooms masked up in order to continue the charade.
There’s absolutely no disputing the hard fact—which we knew already long before COVID—cloth masks can’t block a respiratory virus. The holes in the fabric are too large to stop, like a chain-link fence stopping sand. It just doesn’t work, as Fauci said early on. Moreover, it’s impossible to find any case, anywhere in the world, where the empirical reality of virus spread has been inhibited, much less stopped, by mask-wearing.
Every study that has claimed that they work has been debunked. Without exception.
What does it say about our elite educational institutions that they are very happy to wallow in pseudoscience and mystical belief systems that so brazenly contradict all known evidence? It suggests a profound and institutional problem.
Mask-wearing today is no more effective than bleeding out disease in the Middle Ages. It’s a superstition and nothing more. And yet all the institutions continue to practice it and impose it, degrading their students’ dignity and insulting their intelligence.
Why do the students put up with it? Why do the professors? And why do the parents continue to pay for this nonsense? We all know the ugly truth. It isn’t really for the supposed education that you get from these institutions. YouTube is a better teacher on the specifics of any topic than most university classrooms.
All they really want is the credential at the end. A piece of paper to hang on the wall. That’s what they spend years getting and six figures paying for.
Now, to be sure, there are great professors and great classes. I don’t deny it. Sadly, the best voices on campus are being silenced these days because they’re outnumbered by a “woke” junta that seeks ideological hegemony on campus. This, too, is beyond dispute.
Thus my theory is that the real purpose of the mask is nothing more than imposed ideological signaling. It’s a way for the campus leadership to make clear who’s in charge and what they have the power to do.
We know from the experience of the past three years where the pockets of sanity are in academia. It’s not in the big prestigious universities where closures, masking, and vaccine mandates became the norm. These places wallow in myth and political conformity at the expense of students.
The learning is taking place in smaller religious colleges and liberal arts institutions. Places such as Hillsdale, Ave Maria, and Hampden-Sydney come to mind, but there are others. Before shelling out for your kid to get a university education, be sure to check how the institution handled COVID. If they did closures, masking, and mandates, refuse to fork over one dime.
Sadly, many people will continue to send these institutions impressionable young minds and lots of money for the foreseeable future. The reason is pretty obvious. Parents believe that sending their kids to fetch a degree in something is the best path to professional advancement. Data seem to suggest that this is true, but the cause and effect here isn’t entirely clear. It could be that the kids most likely to experience professional success also happen to be the ones who attend college.
Parents keep shelling out for these schools because they are risk averse and don’t want to abide by the social perception that their offspring are in any sense a failure. So they sacrifice their children’s good minds and their own money for fear of social disapproval and in hopes that their precious darlings will make it big. The truth is that the degree itself guarantees absolutely nothing. A few years after leaving college, every worker will have to swim or sink on his own anyway.
The college years can always waste away four years of what otherwise might be excellent career-building experience in just about any industry. There are really only a few professions that absolutely require college credentials: law, medicine, engineering, and academia itself. Otherwise, most people are truly better off learning on their own and using those four years for career advancement instead. I personally know of many cases of kids who refused college and found themselves way ahead of all their peers as a result.
These institutions are absolutely abusing their captive students. University administrators are just more bricks in the wall. They really should leave those kids alone. It’s bad enough that they’re subjected to ideological indoctrination and shaming for all those years. Forcing them to mask up, much less vaxx up, should be seen as intolerable actions.
