Like most people involved in education, I’ll be glad to see the end of the medical need for facemasks. Masks muffle speech. They destroy the subtlety of expression, sharing complex emotions — an ironic half-smile, deep disappointment, the warmth of approval. Despite the announcement last week that they must still be worn in communal areas, masks are as much an impediment there to a supportive educational ethos as they are in class.
Yet frustration is not the same as real educational harm. There is enough good research on masks’ impact to question the assumption that, overall, they have been educationally harmful.
It’s undeniable that the potential for educational damage is more than just a passing irritation. Most seriously, there is the impact on children whose hearing is impaired. They depend crucially on facial clues — not just lip-reading. The National Deaf Children’s Society emphasised from very early in the pandemic that teachers would have to try many other means of communication than speech.
Even with normal hearing, children depend on faces for learning. Faces are windows on emotion. Babies study the whole face of their mother from their earliest days, long before they understand language. The developing grasp of emotional expression then becomes a core part of how children respond to teachers. Emotionally positive faces encourage creativity. Anger discourages it. That’s why the most effective way of offering criticism of a student’s work is constructively, expressing by means of our whole face the optimism that the student can learn from mistakes. None of this can happen smoothly when half the teacher’s face is covered.
Even more disrupted has been the usual communication among children, for whom the spontaneous expression of emotion simply cannot happen without facial openness.
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There have been many psychological studies of the impact of Covid masks on children in a very wide range of settings — several European countries, Canada, the US, Israel, Singapore and China. Most of these have concentrated on children’s understanding of emotions. That’s intrinsically interesting in itself, but also of great importance in education due to the role of the teacher. A remarkably high proportion of a teacher’s job, at any level of education, involves the communication of emotions.
The general finding of this research is that a mask interferes most with children’s capacity to recognise positive emotions, essentially because the mouth is involved in all of these, whatever our eyes and forehead might be adding. Indeed, a genuine smile can look like a frown when the lower part of the face is covered. That’s a serious hurdle for teaching.
Probably much less important for education is that children have actually been found to be better at recognising anger in someone with a mask than they would be normally. Recognising the educationally unhelpful emotions is not likely to be useful.
So this research is potentially dismaying. Yet children and adults are also inventive. After all, in normal times, visually impaired children make progress in language at much the same speed as others. That particular tribute to the sheer inventiveness of human intelligence should make us question whether masks really have been as harmful as we instinctively suppose.
Some research has looked at the explicitly educational impact of masks. The conclusion is that students and teachers have adapted. Adults have instinctively learnt to talk more slowly, to enunciate more deliberately, to be more explicit in the judgments that they issue. One particularly telling study was done in nursery classrooms in Miami where the researchers happen to have been collecting detailed evidence on children’s language use before Covid. They found no difference when Covid led to people wearing masks.
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The difficulty in all this is disentangling the specific effects of masks from the enormous disruption which Covid has caused to education. The ideal would have been a randomised trial, where some children and teachers would have worn masks and others would not. But, in the depth of a health crisis, that would have been unacceptable ethically.
What is certain is that closing schools was educationally harmful to almost all students, of any age and in all countries. The harm was greatest for children who were not able to get much educational help at home. If masks enabled schools to reopen sooner than they would have done, then the net effect of masks has probably been positive educationally. But they are still an intrusion, and the sooner they can be safely dispensed with the better.
Lindsay Paterson is professor of education policy at Edinburgh University