Purposeful Schooling
“We’re not opposed to education,” a Pennsylvania Amish school advocate asserted. “We’re just against education higher than our heads. I mean education that we don’t need.”8 Indeed, Amish parents insist on sending their children to school—absentee rates are low—but they believe that education always has a purpose and in their case, that purpose is to train children to be productive members of Amish society. The curriculum focuses on reading, writing, and mathematics. Some schools use older, discarded public school math and reading texts, but many more use one of several Amish-authored textbook series, such as the Pathway Readers or Study Time Mathematics.
Although Pennsylvania Dutch is children’s first language, Amish schools are conducted in English because the Amish believe that being functionally bilingual is necessary for getting along in U.S. society. Amish students still practice penmanship and focus on English grammar to a degree that is uncommon in today’s mainstream public and private schools. Many Amish schools also include some instruction for upper-grade students in reading High German, with a focus on the vocabulary and grammar specific to Luther’s German translation of the Bible and other religious texts.
Baseball is a common recess game, played by boys and girls alike, at many Amish schools. Credit: Don Burke
Religion as such is not a subject in Amish schools. There may be a short Bible reading and prayer at the beginning of the day and the class may sing several hymns. But formal instruction in Bible or doctrine is the purview of the church and the responsibility of parents, not young female school teachers. Nevertheless, Amish faith and values permeate the curriculum, from occasional church history stories included in the Pathway Readers to the way the school is organized and functions. For example, competition among children is not stressed; most activities are cooperative. Rather than charting and comparing how quickly individual students learn multiplication facts, for example, the emphasis is on an entire grade learning their math facts and on advanced students helping slower ones. Timed tests are quite rare, and students are told to take the time they need to do their best work rather than hurry. On the playground, teachers may intentionally mix teams each day to discourage ongoing competitive rivalry on the ball diamond or volleyball court.
Amish schools also reflect the range of Amish subgroups. Very conservative Swartzentruber communities, for example, focus on rudimentary learning and include more rote memorization than is common in other Amish schools. Amish schools from relatively more liberal communities favor more interactive pedagogies, often have colorful bulletin boards adorning the walls, and may put on short programs for parents and grandparents at Christmas and at the end of the school year during which students sing and recite poetry. These more progressive schools sometimes administer nationally standardized tests, and the results reveal proficiency in reading, writing, and math.9 Indeed, measured in terms of occupational outcomes, Amish schooling seems quite adequate. Today graduates of eight-grade Amish schools operate thousands of thriving, profitable businesses across North America, as we’ll see in the next chapter.
In the end, parents at all types of Amish schools judge their schools successful if they prepare hardworking youth with strong, practical skills. Amish education does not place youth on a track to become a lawyer or a concert pianist or a chemical engineer. From the perspective of modernity, those kinds of limits seem painfully parochial. From the Amish perspective, schools are doing what they should be doing when they work in harmony with family and church to cultivate disciplined, thoughtful, cooperative young people who will possess the inclination and the capacity to contribute to their community.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Work and Technology
Under bright skies and warm July sun, the twentieth annual Horse Progress Days opened in Arcola, Illinois, in 2013. The family of Vernon and Lizzie Ann Yoder hosted the event, which drew nearly 20,000 people—almost all of them Amish—to their 120-acre farm. The gathering, which rotates from one community to another, highlights new technology adapted for animal-powered equipment as well as “the latest equipment innovations” to show that horse farming “is possible, practical, and profitable.”1
Each year Horse Progress Days features innovative products and at the 2013 event there was considerable buzz around a new technology known as ground-driven power-take-off. The technology uses the basic movement of horses and the wheeled cart they pull to generate enough revolutions per minute (RPM) to power hay mowers, hay balers, manure spreaders, and other farm equipment originally designed for use with power-take-off from a tractor motor. In short, the ground-driven variety allows farmers to operate fairly advanced equipment with no gasoline or diesel engine, not even a battery.
Planners recognized the irony of linking the term “progress” with an event that seems the epitome of old fashioned. “Agri-business people have made the word ‘innovation’ into something that is mainly used to market the latest and the greatest,” one Ohio Amish man conceded. But “the word is also appropriately used to describe the [new] farming equipment the shop lads have come up with.” In the case of the ground-driven power-take-off, the “shop lads” were I & J Manufacturing and White Horse Machine, both of Pennsylvania, and Wildcat Ridge Gears in Kentucky. These three firms are among several thousand Amish-run small businesses that have sprung up across the country in the past quarter century. In fact, if there is irony at Horse Progress Days, it is that the success of animal power farming has been spurred on by the entrepreneurial spirit of Amish who have moved off the farm and exchanged their plows for weekly paychecks as business people and day laborers.
Amish farming is far from dead. But agriculture has changed, and in most Amish settlements sizable majorities of families no longer till the soil—a change that has significant ramifications for Amish society. For those who continue to farm creatively, as well as for those who have moved into the world of shop work, technology looms large in shaping the contemporary definition of what it means to be Amish. The Amish have never rejected technology, but they use it on their own terms, terms that shape their lives and work in ways that reinforce their distinctive identity and separation from the world.
Down on the Farm
Until the later 1900s almost all Amish households worked the land. Farming was an esteemed way of life, according to one writer, because it put one in tune with “the natural order of daylight and dark, sunshine and rain, the swing of the seasons, and the blessings with which God has ordered our world.” Compare this, he continued, “with the largely artificial environment of urban centers where night is well-lit, rain is the way to ruin a day, and food and fiber originate at the local store.”2
In the mid-twentieth century Amish farms were typically small, diversified, and relied on family labor. Several cows, pigs, and chickens might complement forty to fifty acres of hay, corn, and wheat, along with a cash crop such as tobacco (in Lancaster, Pennsylvania) or peppermint (around Nappanee, Indiana). As mechanized tractor farming swept the countryside in the years after World War II, almost all Amish communities resisted. A handful of places—Kalona, Iowa; Haven, Kansas; Chouteau, Oklahoma; and a few others—adopted tractors, but the vast majority of Amish continued to till the soil with horses. (Those buying tractors, however, continued to use horse-and-buggy transportation on the road.)
Demonstrating an innovative two-way plow, manufactured by White Horse Machine Company, at the 2014 gathering of Horse Progress Days, Mount Hope, Ohio. Credit: Douglas Scheetz
Given the fact that farming functioned as an ideal occupation, Ordnung governing farm technology was especially slow to change. Tampering with tradition threatened to destroy the value that Amish people ascribed to farming in the first place. Yet as the years wore on, the realities of farming on a small scale proved more and more difficult economically and threatened to throw families off the land they loved. For example, as state health boards moved to require that milk be cooled in refrigerated bulk tanks, Amish dairymen faced a dilemma. In
some places, such as Lancaster, Pennsylvania, they agreed to install tanks and refrigeration units powered by small diesel engines (rather than by public utility electricity). Among more conservative Amish affiliations, choices ran in different directions. They opted to retain milking by hand and cooling their milk by submerging their old-fashioned milk cans in cold water. But such choices meant that their milk could only be sold as Grade B for use in making cheese, which meant a lower price than that commanded by Grade A milk for drinking.
By the 1970s and 1980s the realities of the agriculture economy were putting a squeeze on small farmers. The Amish population was growing rapidly, while rising land prices, veterinary bills, and equipment, seed, and fertilizer costs were forcing young people to reconsider whether farming would be in their future. During these decades, in almost all Amish settlements, the number and percentage of households that moved into nonfarm jobs shot upward. Only about a third of families in Michigan, for example, were still farming in the early 2000s, about a quarter in western Pennsylvania’s Lawrence County, and less than 20 percent in Holmes County, Ohio.
For the minority of Amish who remained on the land, the 1990s and early 2000s actually witnessed something of an agricultural renaissance. New technology, like that featured at Horse Progress Days, reduced costs and kept small-scale farming viable. In 2007 a detailed study in Geauga County, Ohio, that looked at horse and human labor required to farm found that on a per acre basis the financial return was considerably higher on Amish farms. Amish farms are much smaller, so the overall income was less than on a sprawling agribusiness spread. But with family labor and lower overhead costs in the Amish mix, farming with horses can be profitable.3
At the same time, a growing number of families have moved away from dairy and grain farming and into raising produce. Capitalizing on household labor and using wholesale produce auctions to get their products in the hands of restaurants and upscale grocery stores, a new generation of Amish farmers are able to support themselves growing tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, melons, and herbs. Other new agriculture initiatives include commercial fish farming, dairy goat herds, and the establishment of greenhouses offering retail and wholesale bedding plants and flowers.
Although many observers assume that Amish farms have always been all-organic producers, in fact during the course of the twentieth century most had begun using chemical herbicides and pesticides, to some degree, and adopted hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers in addition to animal manure. The emergence of intensive produce farming, however, kick-started an Amish conversation about organic production—in some cases because non-Amish customers requested it, but also because “it was the right thing to do because it fit our beliefs,” in the words of one Indiana farmer.4 In 2003 a group of Amish produce farmers in Holmes County, Ohio, launched Green Field Farms as an organic marketing cooperative distributing vegetables, milk, and eggs. Today, more Amish farmers have gone organic than at any time in the recent past, but these producers still represent a minority of all Amish farms.
The Rise of Off-Farm Jobs
Amish agriculture is alive and well, but it represents a much smaller slice of the Amish occupational pie than it did in the 1950s. The shift away from farming has been the most significant change in Amish life since the group’s arrival in North America, although the implications of that shift vary depending upon the type of work that has replaced plowing the fields. Work in factories, in construction trades, and in home-based manufacturing or retail shops have come to define the way most Amish people spend their work days.5
Nationally, employment in factories is the least common alternative to farming, but in some large settlements it is the norm. In northern Indiana’s Elkhart-LaGrange and Nappanee settlements and in Geauga County, Ohio, jobs in industry have long been central to the Amish economy. In northern Indiana, more than half of working-age men punch a time clock, laboring in non-Amish-owned factories that build large recreational vehicles (RVs) and pop-up campers, which the Amish themselves would never purchase. In other settlements, Amish factory workers mass produce kitchen cabinets and garage doors, or labor on assembly lines with hot-rubber-extruding processes.
An Amish worker attaches siding to a recreational vehicle in a factory in Elkhart County, Indiana. Half of working-age Amish men in north central Indiana are employed in non-Amish industry. Credit: iStock / Scott Olson
Industry may seem alien to Amish tradition, but it has come to fit some communities because it pays well, does not require high school credentials, and all the advanced equipment is owned by outsiders and is confined to the factory floor. An employee who drives a forklift or uses an inventory app on the company’s iPad cannot use these items at home since they remain at the plant when the shift ends. Of course, such employment does introduce seeds of social change. Factory work is limited to forty hours a week and often includes paid vacation, thus giving employees much more leisure time than a farmer can ever enjoy. Moreover, most industry employs only men, meaning that work for them is separated from home and from intergenerational interaction. Finally, because such work does not require any investment on the part of the workers other than a lunch box, industry jobs pump disposable income into Amish communities that encourages consumer spending and perks like eating in restaurants that are not possible for farm families who need to reinvest profits back into the land.
Work in construction—carpentry, roofing, masonry, and more specialized trades—is a second area of external employment. Unlike factory work, it carries a legitimacy linked to tradition. Farmers in earlier generations often spent winter months operating sawmills or building furniture, and the skills associated with old-fashioned barn raisings (in which a group of builders erected a barn in a day) point to long-standing connections between Amish culture and construction. Yet today’s world of custom building takes Amish labor in some very new directions. Like factory work, it is a male-dominated sector and Amish contractors and their employees spend very long days away from home—sometimes spending the night in distant motels when the job site is far from their community. Transportation to and from the construction area almost always requires a permanent relationship with one or more drivers who own or lease trucks and provide daily transport to urban and suburban worksites. Contractors were also among the first Amish to begin using cell phones to communicate with suppliers and subcontractors, and many have upgraded to smart phones. Church leaders wanted cell phones to remain turned off and in the truck after work hours, but contractors admit that doesn’t always happen.
A World of Small Shops
By far the most common alternative to farming has been the creation of small shops. Since the mid-1970s a quiet industrial revolution has reshaped Amish society with as many as twelve thousand Amish-owned firms sprouting in settlements all across North America. Many are cottage industries that employ only a single family, while others are growth-oriented small businesses that employ five to thirty other people and have wider product lines and larger sales volumes. Amish businesses make, repair, and retail all sorts of things. There are furniture shops, leather works, welding shops, bicycle repair shops, small groceries, dry goods stores, auctioneers, butchers, and bookkeepers. Some focus on the Amish market, making carriages or felt hats, for example, while others cater to a non-Amish clientele, such as a quilt shop that draws on the tourist trade. A great many businesses span Amish and non-Amish markets.
Signs for Amish enterprises near Salem, Arkansas, indicate no sales on Sundays, publicly acknowledging the moral boundaries of Amish business. Credit: Don Burke
Entrepreneurship is rooted in the cultural soil of Amish society, drawing on skills honed through years of self-employed and resourceful farming. Owners laud shops as the next best thing to farm life: these businesses often draw on the labor of the entire family, including children and grandparents, and because they are home based, such firms do not separate husbands from the rest of the household. In addition, Amish shops are under the control of the family, who can set the term
s and conditions of work. Signs proclaiming “No Sunday sales” are ubiquitous and help stake out the religious boundaries of work. Production schedules can also flex to allow for time off to attend midweek weddings or to accommodate special days in their traditional religious calendar, such as Ascension Day (forty days after Easter) or Pentecost Monday. Such flexibility also allows them to work right through civic holidays, such as Memorial Day or Labor Day, that do not mean much to them.
Yet small business ownership brings its own set of challenges and changes. Families appreciate the fact that work is home based, but that characteristic means that negotiating technological change and navigating commercial demands also take place in the home itself. English-speaking customers, delivery drivers, and wholesalers engage children and adults on a regular basis. The pressures of production encourage the adoption of new technologies, not on a distant job site or factory floor but around hearth and home. The adage “the customer is always right” may reshape priorities and practices in subtle ways. Not least, many home-based businesses are financial successes, netting millions of dollars a year and presenting Amish families with the problem of wealth. Church Ordnung puts the brakes on conspicuous consumption—buggies are all roughly the same sort, for example, and jewelry is forbidden—but entrepreneurs’ hunting cabins or winter apartments in Sarasota, Florida, offer retreats for the well heeled that set them apart.
Amish businesses succeed, in part, because of the cultural capital entrepreneurs bring to the workplace. Low overhead costs and family labor enhance the bottom line, as does the church’s commitment to mutual aid. Health and liability insurance is provided by the church, releasing businesses from the inflated premiums charged by for-profit insurers. Amish employers and their Amish employees are exempt from Social Security and Medicare taxes (and, in some states, from workers’ compensation).
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