I find Bari Weiss’ The Free Press invaluable. If you don’t read it regularly you are missing out on some great reporting.

I have subscribed since before it became The Free Press–in fact since Bari Weiss started it after resigning from The New York Times.

With that plug out of the way I want to discuss David Zweig’s piece on The School that Couldn’t Quit COVID. It is both fascinating and disturbing, as it explores an extreme example of a societal sickness that I fear may never go away. And by that, I don’t just mean COVID mania, but a deeper mental illness driven by a need to put social identity over any contact with reality.

It's April 2023 and the students of Elizabeth Ann Clune Montessori School of Ithaca—the offspring of professors, doctors, and lawyers—still mask outdoors and eat lunch in silence. @davidzweig reports on the school that just can't quit Covid:https://t.co/8eyDM8iY3D

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) April 10, 2023

First the basics: the story is about a private school in upstate New York that remains in a COVID-induced time warp.

The Elizabeth Ann Clune Montessori School of Ithaca, set amid a pastoral idyll of rolling fields, a pond, and dandelion-stippled meadows, is just a few minutes’ ride from Ithaca College and Cornell University. Serving more than 220 students from preschool through eighth grade, the school features classrooms bathed in natural light, populated with the offspring of professors, doctors, and lawyers. And since the fall of 2020 through today, those children must be masked during class and on the playground, and have been barred from speaking during lunch.

Like every other school in the country, this private school—which charges between $11,000 to $18,000 a year, depending on the student’s age—closed to in-person classes in the spring of 2020. That fall, around the time the local public schools brought kids back, so did EACMSI, but with a list of mitigations. Some were typical and required by the state, such as distancing and indoor masking. But others, at least after a while, were less common or not recommended by health authorities—specifically, outdoor masking and a ban on speaking during lunch.

The school itself serves the cream of Ithaca society. It is a rather high-priced school, and its clientele is the children of professors and others associated with one of the most elite schools in the United States, Cornell. For those of you not in the know, Cornell considers itself the best of the Ivy League schools, and its students often look down on the plebs who attend Harvard and Yale. Of course, the same is true for Harvard and Yale students, who return the favor.

This elite private school serving Ithaca’s best and brightest requires masks to be worn outside and students to remain silent at lunch. Its students, including those playing wind instruments, are required to wear masks even when playing their instruments.

Even when they are playing outside, as in a parade.

In other words, the people who run this school are insane. There was never a time when such measures were appropriate, but at least there was a time when doing so seemed the right thing to do to many people. European countries never followed such rules for school children, but at least there was an excuse to do so here because our own public health officials were lying jerks.

But whatever the excuse in 2020, there is no rational reason to do this in 2023. Not even the most aggressive COVID crazy–well, perhaps ONLY our most aggressive COVID crazy–public health officials would recommend this. Even hospitals are pulling back from requiring masks, and the CDC lifted the requirement last year.

So the question is: why are they doing this, and more particularly why is a school that serves the most educated people in America doing this?

The latter explains the former.

People at the high end of the income and education scale have become the most conformist and least rational people in America.

I wrote about this last week, discussing a study that showed that education, trust in the MSM, and the inability to grasp reality are all correlated highly. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to trust the MSM and “experts,” and the less likely you are to know basic facts about how the real world actually operates.

2020 Survey: "How many unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019?"

The Washington Post's police shooting database says 12.

54% of "Very Liberals" (least accurate) estimated 1,000+.

13% of "Conservatives" (most accurate) estimated 1,000+. pic.twitter.com/zOXADsQ4pm

— Skeptic Research Center Team (@SkepResCenter) April 4, 2023

There is a lot of information packed into the study and this is just the tip of the iceberg. But the bottom line is that liberal, highly educated people don’t have a clue. They trust The Narrative™ and adhere to it like glue as a signal of their being especially good people. And the more extreme they are in abiding by the written and unwritten rules the better the people they are in their own view.

So of course the most liberal and the most highly educated people in America are the most likely to go to extremes while feeling superior to everybody else.

Zweig’s story focuses on the few parents who dissented, and almost to a person they refused to go on record except anonymously. They are literally afraid of being singled out as dissenters from the insane “consensus” of their peers.

And those are the dissenters! Only one of them actually took their child out of the school. The rest comply while privately grumbling.

I asked several parents why they haven’t said something to the administration about the masking and lunchtime speaking prohibition. Both told me that the administration gave the distinct impression that they were not interested in dissent, and that most parents were too timid to try to organize a collective response.

Imagine how insanely conformist the people who approve of this policy are. It’s as if they are in a circle staring at each other daring them to be less virtuous than they are.

To put it politically incorrectly, a Mexican standoff.

If these people were off in a cult somewhere in the mountains of Idaho they would, perhaps, merit a joke. But as Cornell professors and administrators they both demand and often have the right to run our lives. They comprise the expert class, The Science™, and educate the next generation of technocrats who will become Masters of the Universe™.

It’s insane. And it’s the world we live in.