The Amish accept death in graceful ways, observed one funeral director. Comparing them to other people with whom he has worked, he said, “The Amish are more reserved, quieter, and subdued at death. There are some tears, but no loud crying or wailing, just a lot of silent crying.” A painful separation laced with grief, death is received in the spirit of Gelassenheit—as the ultimate surrender to God’s higher ways. The bereaved allow tears to flow, but the sobs are restrained as people submit quietly to divine purpose.
This sampler of the rhythms of Amish community demonstrates the many ways in which cultural and social capital are mobilized to assist individuals and bolster the common good. These resources enable the Amish to prosper in many ways—from financial and social strength to emotional well-being. Their solidarity results in part from their success in thwarting the forces of modernity that threaten to diminish social capital and dissolve the bonds of community.
Although some communal customs have changed over the decades, many Amish practices have quietly resisted the tendrils of modernity that could erode community. Not all the resistance has been quiet, however. Amish people displayed a very public and forthright protest to the expansion of formal education in the twentieth century, a story we explore in the next chapter.
CHAPTER 14
EDUCATION
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In May 1991 Lucian Niemeyer received an invitation to visit an Amish school. A recently retired business executive from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Niemeyer had started making regular visits to Lancaster County and, along the way, had forged friendships with members of the Amish settlement there. That morning, after observing the classroom and its thirty-two students from a back-row seat, Niemeyer’s eyes filled with tears. As he wiped them with his handkerchief, he confided apologetically to a friend, “I can’t believe it. This is the way it should be. It’s amazing to see it right here in the midst of our modern commotion.”
* * *
The Demise of the Little Red Schoolhouse
When Niemeyer visited Clear Valley School, he wept to see a scene long gone from public schools. There was the nineteen-year-old teacher, Lydia, and her seventeen-year-old assistant, Erma, skillfully teaching almost three dozen first through eighth graders in a one-room school. Colorful chalk drawings of rural scenes filled one side of the blackboard. Individual posters, each with a pupil’s name, were fastened to one wall. Pink streamers hung from the ceiling, and seventeen straw hats hung from pegs on the back wall. The open windows offered the students a view of cows and horses in a nearby pasture.
After Lydia read Psalms 100, the pupils repeated the Lord’s Prayer and sang a German hymn, followed by an English one. Then the work began. Lydia taught clusters of students from two grades at a time, sometimes at their seats and other times at the blackboard. The first and second graders practiced math with flash cards while the seventh and eighth graders calculated percentages and the diameter of a circle. Other students quietly helped one another in an orderly way. Five or six hands would shoot up whenever Lydia posed a question. When students completed their worksheets properly, Erma pasted smiley faces on them.
A visitor might assume that Clear Valley School was an ancient Amish institution. In fact, it was founded in 1962 as the Amish began establishing their own schools by repackaging old-fashioned public education in an Amish box.
The story of Amish education offers a compelling demonstration of Amish resistance to key educational trends of the twentieth century, including school consolidation, busing of children to centralized schools outside their local communities, an extended school year, and additional years of compulsory education. The resistance was so stiff that hundreds of parents were imprisoned.
Until 1950 virtually all Amish parents sent their children to small, rural public schools, where they studied with non-Amish peers and teachers. In some areas Amish fathers served on local school boards. As long as such public schools were small, under local control, and following a traditional curriculum, Amish parents had no objections.1
In the course of the twentieth century, elementary and secondary education in the United States was transformed in profound ways. In 1913 about half of America’s schoolchildren attended a single-teacher school. Fifty years later the portion had tumbled to 1 percent.2 As a result of massive consolidation, several small schools morphed into one large district that required busing students. In a single decade (1918–1928), one-room schools across the nation closed at the rate of 4,000 per year. Meanwhile, states were setting new standards for teacher education, and legislatures were increasing the length of the school year and the number of required years. Science and technology, as well as physical education, became prominent parts of the curriculum.
These changes in the first half of the century were propelled by urbanization, new standards for pedagogy, a growing national commitment to compulsory education, paved roads and motor vehicles that permitted busing, and, above all, an ideology of progress that promoted schooling for citizenship in a democratic society.
A Long, Contentious Struggle
Three changes in particular kindled the Amish response: the consolidation of small schools into large units, the growing emphasis on high school education, and the enforcement of compulsory attendance laws. The Amish reaction varied by region because educational laws were state-based. The first recorded clash occurred in 1914 in Geauga County, Ohio, when three Amish fathers were fined for refusing to send their children to ninth grade.3 In 1921 eleven fathers were jailed in northern Indiana for withdrawing their children from ninth grade, and more were imprisoned three years later.4
Beginning in 1937, the battle over schools ensued in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, and Kansas. By the late 1960s, it had spread to Wisconsin. Dozens of Amish parents were arrested and served short stints in prison. In one Pennsylvania township alone, more than 125 parents were arrested, some of them as many as five times. Several conflicts became bitter, pitting Amish people against their non-Amish neighbors.
Two controversies, one in Pennsylvania in 1937 and the other in Iowa in 1965, catapulted the Amish struggle into the national spotlight. Amish families in East Lam-peter Township, near Smoketown, Pennsylvania, protested plans to replace ten one-room schools with a single consolidated elementary school building. In November 1937, with the blessing of their bishops, the Delegation for Common Sense Schooling presented a 130-foot scroll-like petition with three thousand signatures from Amish and non-Amish neighbors to state officials asking to be exempt from a new law that stretched the school year to nine months and raised the age when children could leave school with a work permit to fifteen. The petitioners argued that they would only send their children to public schools “with a free conscience” if the schooling were limited to eight months a year, terminated after the “low grades,” and taught “the truth” in a one-room schoolhouse.”5
The brouhaha in Pennsylvania caught the attention of the New York Times, which published twenty-three articles about the Amish between March 1937 and December 1938, many of them tracking the East Lampeter conflict. In the previous twenty years, the Times had published only five articles about the Amish.6
Nearly thirty years later, a school conflict near Hazleton, Iowa, sparked another blitz of national media attention when a photo of Amish children scampering into a cornfield to avoid being bused to a consolidated school hit the press. This image stirred public sympathies across the country, including those of a Lutheran pastor who lived in Michigan. Reverend William C. Lindholm eventually founded the National Committee for Amish Religious Freedom—a group of scholars, religious leaders, and lawyers that helped take the Amish cause to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Amish Objections
Why were these quiet people willing to face prison, lobby legislators, and circulate petitions? In short, because they wanted to retain control of their children’s education and because they objected to the new compulsory attendance rules that lengthened the school year and mandated some high school. “
We have what we want, so why fool with it?” asked one Amish father. Four educational themes permeated their protests: mode, curriculum, control, and consequences.
Mode. The Amish distinguish between schooling (“book learning”), which teaches skills, and education (wisdom), which inculcates values. Although they permit children to be schooled by “outsiders,” they have never allowed them to be “educated by the world.”7 Schooling is necessary for children to acquire the factual knowledge of reading, writing, and speaking English, and the mathematical skills necessary to run a business, farm, or household. At the same time, the Amish have always stressed the limits of book learning and argued for practical training and learning by doing, guided by example and experience. Book learning, they feared, would lead their youth away from manual work. Beyond eighth grade they wanted an Amish equivalent of apprenticeships supervised by parents. A frequent Amish refrain is that they are not opposed to schooling, but they consider advanced formal schooling unnecessary.
Curriculum. Amish parents argued that high schools lauded “worldly wisdom,” a phrase they borrowed from Martyrs Mirror, and that worldly wisdom clashed with the “wisdom from above.” They cited Scriptures suggesting that human wisdom is foolishness in the eyes of God (1 Cor. 1:18–28) and that too much knowledge makes people proud (1 Cor. 8:1). Moreover, Amish people insisted that the worldly emphasis on individual achievement, along with a curriculum that included evolutionary biology and sex education, would spoil their children (Col. 2:8). “When you have too much education you become strong, arrogant, and lose your humility. If you get high-minded then the honor goes to you instead of God,” said a retired business owner.
Control. The Amish wanted schools controlled by the local community or their church. They believed that God had charged parents with the responsibility of nurturing and training their children and that that responsibility could not be passed off to a distant state bureaucracy. They wanted trustworthy teachers who were known in the community and sympathetic to Amish values and rural ways. Amish leaders refused, in their words, to just “hand our children over” to professional educators. Parents repeatedly pleaded for a continuation of the one-room school within walking distance from home.
Consequences. The paramount fear of Amish parents was that modern education would lead youth away from their faith and undermine the church. The wisdom of the world, said Amish sages, “makes you restless, wanting to leap and jump and not knowing where you will land.”8 Too much association with worldly friends, they worried, would corrupt their youth and lead to marriage and other intimate associations with outsiders.
For the Amish, the church-community depends on a practical education in which wisdom is acquired through sharing labor, learning responsibility, interacting with elders, doing chores, and listening to conversations around the kitchen table. While schooling prepares children to write letters, read newspapers, and do the arithmetic to pay bills, an education prepares them “to live for others, to use [their] talents in service to God and Man, to live an upright and obedient life, and to prepare for the life to come.”9
An “Explosion” of Amish Schools
The Amish began building their own schools in response to the educational changes and the arrests of parents.10 Their first private school was founded in 1925 when the state of Delaware announced plans to abolish one-room schools and limit the number of elementary grades to six.11 By 1938 a second school was operating in Delaware and two schools had started in Pennsylvania.
These four schools were the only ones established before World War II.12 The real “explosion,” to use the term of an Amish periodical, occurred after 1950, as the forces of consolidation reached into more isolated rural areas. Fifty-nine Amish schools started in the 1950s. The decade of 1956–1965 saw nearly ten new schools each year, so that by 1970 Amish schools in fourteen states and Ontario were educating nearly 10,000 pupils.13
Writing in 1963, a leader noted, “The art of teaching, unknown in Amish circles a generation ago, has really caught fire among us. … Most of our teachers do a lot of self-study, burning gallons of midnight oil to make themselves better teachers. Many have taken subjects by correspondence.”14
The growth of the Amish school movement, as shown in figure 14.1, was propelled by energetic advocates in various settlements and Blackboard Bulletin, an Amish-edited periodical that offered teachers practical classroom advice. Building their own schools led to state-wide and even national cooperation in the establishment of curriculum, the preparation of school textbooks, and teacher training.
The rise of Amish schools solved the issue of public school consolidation, but not compulsory attendance laws. Those conflicts were worked out on a state-by-state basis, sometimes amicably and other times not. Pennsylvania found a face-saving solution in 1955 when officials and Amish leaders negotiated a vocational school program. This arrangement permitted pupils to leave school when they turned fourteen or had completed the eighth grade, provided they kept a journal of their vocational duties and attended a half-day of classes once a week until they turned fifteen, at which time they qualified for a work permit. The state could say that Amish pupils were still in school, and Amish parents could have fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds where they wanted them—at home.15
Although some other states adopted a version of the Pennsylvania compromise, the plan was not accepted everywhere. Ultimately, litigation resulting from a conflict in Wisconsin ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1972 ruled in Wisconsin v. Yoder that “enforcement of the State’s requirement of compulsory formal education after the eighth grade would infringe upon the free exercise of … [Amish] religious beliefs.”16
FIGURE 14.1. Growth of Amish Schools, 1945–2015. Source: Blackboard Bulletin.
Although the high court’s decision settled the legitimacy of Amish schools and schooling for the most part, the school movement was already well established, with some three hundred schools. And although testimony in the case focused on the threat of public education for the Amish, the practical consequence of Yoder was to permit Amish youth to enter apprenticeships when they turned fourteen. By 1985, thirteen years after the Supreme Court decision, the number of Amish schools had doubled to nearly six hundred.
The Structure of Amish Schooling
Organization
In 2012 about 55,000 Amish pupils were being taught by 3,000 teachers in 2,000 private Amish schools in North America.17 Schools are built when a new settlement forms and, most frequently, as local church districts grow. Depending on the number of young families, a Gmay may have its own school or schools, or two or three different districts may send their children to the same school. About twenty to thirty students attend each one-room school, forty to sixty if the school is a larger building.
Typically, three or five school directors—usually fathers appointed by parents—are responsible for managing one or two local Amish schools.18 The directors recruit and hire teachers, set educational policies, maintain facilities, and manage school finances. Regional school meetings, held annually, provide training and guidance for school directors, teachers, and some church leaders.19 The one- or two-day event includes presentations and discussions on pertinent topics for teachers and school directors.20
Several different models are used to finance schools. In some church districts all households pay a “school tax,” but in other places, only the parents of currently enrolled students pay tuition. In still other communities, these two approaches are combined. Some schools offer a discount for multiple children from the same family.
School budgets vary, but in recent years the annual budget for a typical Amish school in eastern Pennsylvania was slightly over $22,000. This included $13,000 in compensation for a teacher and her aide, plus $3,300 for their transportation because they lived far away and hired an English neighbor to drive them. The annual cost per pupil was $738. The nearby public school district’s per pupil cost was $10,016.21 In the smaller schools of the most conservative communities
, the cost is far less, for teachers are paid less and walk or travel by buggy to work. In any case, in addition to financing their private schools, Amish property owners pay public school taxes.
Teachers
Teachers are typically young, single Amish women who begin teaching at about eighteen years of age. Generally, they are selected for their academic accomplishment, ability to manage a classroom, and embodiment of Amish values. A handful of teachers are men, and very occasionally an Amish school board will hire a non-Amish teacher. The preparation of teachers varies by affiliation, region, and state requirements. In the most conservative settlements, teachers enter the classroom with little or no training. For example, one Swartzentruber Amish teacher, in talking about her preparation for teaching, noted that as a student she had seen good teachers and bad ones, so when she started teaching, she just tried to follow the example of the good ones.
The bulk of the preparation for those who do receive training occurs in the special meetings for new teachers that are held in some regions, in informal mentorships with seasoned teachers, and in the study of teacher’s manuals and textbooks available from Amish bookstores. Because almost all teachers are themselves graduates of an Amish school, they approach their role by seeking to replicate the school experience they had. In some progressive settlements, new teachers take correspondence courses and pass the GED High School Equivalency Test or the Standardized 12th Grade Achievement Test.
The turnover rate is fairly high, because after four or five years in the classroom many young women leave teaching for marriage. A few single women make a career of teaching, but for the most part, teachers change regularly. Indeed, one school director notes that there are “two things people never want to hear: taxes are going up and the teacher has a boyfriend.”
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