THE usual knobheads are desperately worried about compulsory masks at secondary school. These educational experiences are way worse:
Wedgies
Do adults honestly think a 13-year-old gives a toss about wearing a cloth on their face when they’re used to having cloth forcefully wedged up between their buttocks? Secondary school is a harsh, hostile environment of forcefully-expressed loathing, even more so than anti-vaxx Twitter.
School dinners
Aside from the brown crunchy cake with the pink custard, all school dinners are unremittingly vile. If young people can become hardened to eating that shit day after day for years of their lives, they can cope with wearing a mask in the classroom.
PE
Getting chased down a rugby pitch by post-pubertal psychopaths intent on breaking a limb. Playing hockey on a surface harder than diamonds which will rip the flesh from your bones. Throwing javelins with uncoordinated hormonal idiots. Physical education is a theatre of pain that should be banned long before face coverings are.
A French exchange
Being sent to live in a village in Correze with a sulky girl who abhors you, when you can only ask for directions to the bakery and not understand the answer, is scarring. As is nearly getting arrested by a gendarme after shoplifting a bottle of Martini from a supermarché. A mask isn’t.
Non-uniform day
Though in theory fun, all non-uniform day does is offer the most vicious bullies – pupils or teacher – six hours to ridicule their peers mercilessly for some perceived sartorial mistake, like pink socks. If teenagers can cope with that, they can cope with masks. At least masks hide acne.
