Serious debates within Amish communities about the merits of private versus public schools were typical in the mid-twentieth century. Public school sympathizers thought elementary-age children would benefit by mingling with non-Amish peers and developing local friendships. Similarly, some Amish parents now send their children to public schools so they “learn to get along in the world.”37 An Amish woman in southwestern Michigan echoes those sentiments regarding her own children: “If they grow up Amish, go to the Amish church, go to the Amish school, and only see other Amish, they won’t know anything about the world.”38
Besides, when Amish people make up a sizable proportion of the general population—and a large share of the school-age population—as in St. Joseph County, Michigan, or eastern Holmes County, Ohio—public schools might be sensitive to Amish preferences. In such places, Amish students in public schools feel secure because they have ample Amish peers and teachers who respect Amish parental wishes.39 In Holmes County, for example, Amish children in public schools see that English children are different, which reinforces ethnic boundaries. A former Ohio Amish teacher notes that he went to a public school as a child and that he and his fellow Amish students “were aware that we were different and had to be.” Although the Amish in Arthur, Illinois, have seventeen private schools, about 10 percent of their children attend public schools. Those in public schools are mixed with non-Amish in the first six grades, but they are placed in Amish-only classrooms for seventh and eighth grade, when their non-Amish peers transfer to the local junior high school.
Various factors play into a decision to send a child to public school. A family in Michigan, for example, sent their children to a nearby public school because traveling to the Amish school required crossing a dangerous highway by buggy. Conflict within an Amish school or community may also motivate parents to send their children to public school. When different Amish affiliations live side by side, sending children to public school may be easier than dealing with competing church regulations and expectations in a single one-room school. It may be difficult for parents to explain to their private-schooled children why they cannot do or have the same things as their classmates from a different Amish affiliation.40
A few Amish parents consider Amish schools inferior to public ones. One former teacher thinks that since the Amish won the right to establish their own schools, some communities have become lax in their attention to education standards. He notes that, when some settlements established teacher training meetings, “in [my] community they felt it wasn’t necessary. We’ve hired teachers that weren’t qualified and the schools suffered.” Finally, some parents admit to sending their children to public schools simply because they are tuition-free.
A growing reliance on the Internet and other technologies in public education has pushed more and more Amish families into private schools, however. In 1978 about half the Amish children in the Nappanee, Indiana, settlement attended public schools, but by 2002 only one in five did.41 An Amish leader in Indiana put it this way: “Amish are stubborn. And back in 1967 the public schools were not all that bad. Local schools were ninety-five percent Amish. … The teachers were teaching sound doctrine—no evolution or computers. As long as things were like that, we didn’t need our own schools. [But] as public schools changed and became more worldly, more [parents] sent their kids to parochial schools.”42
It Takes a Tribe
Homeschooling
Given their long-standing belief that parents hold the primary responsibility to educate their children, why do Amish people frown on homeschooling? Their objection reveals their assumptions about the necessity of community-based education.
Amish leaders strongly discourage homeschooling for several reasons. Their system of private schools was well-established and maturing as the homeschooling movement arose in the 1980s. Private schools are important agencies to promote inter-family cooperation and reinforcement of community values and practices. In the school context, young children learn the skills of collaboration, cooperation, and the importance of fitting in with a group larger than their family. In this way, Amish schools socialize students for adult life in a collective ethnic community.
Leaders fear that households that educate their own children will become too independent and self-sufficient and thus troublesome in a church-community that values unity. In addition, teaching generally falls to the mother, who is already responsible for handling many daily chores for her large family. Church restrictions on transportation, telephone, and Internet use also limit access to educational resources for homeschool teachers.
Making a case against homeschooling, one Amish educational leader said, “We all need the help of others in shaping our children’s character. We all need the church and the community to enable our children to develop and to be able to function with others.” A good school, he argues, “can help children learn to live in harmony with a diversity of talents and personalities.”43 Some groups are so opposed to home-schooling that they have excommunicated families that insisted on teaching their own children.44
Apprenticeship
The secret of Amish education lies in the power of informal apprenticeship after eighth grade. This aspect of Amish socialization is rarely described in the scholarly literature.45 Yet apprenticeship, as much if not more than schools, explains how Amish youth learn the skills, attitudes, and habits that prepare them for productive lives in Amish society as well as in the broader world.
The informal apprenticeship system is, by default, custom tailored for each person. Nonetheless, it produces young adults who are equipped with technical, trade, entrepreneurial, managerial, homemaking, and agricultural skills appropriate to their church-community as well as the work habits that provide a solid foundation for life, as the following examples illustrate:
• A fourteen-year-old girl manages her mother’s small quilt shop adjacent to their home on Saturdays, evenings, and during the summer. She greets visitors, explains the various fabrics, and handles the sales.
• An eighteen-year-old boy takes over the management of his father’s woodworking shop. He is authorized to hire, fire, and supervise the five other employees—all of whom are older, some in their fifties and sixties.
• A fourteen-year-old boy, employed in the family hydraulic equipment business, travels by hired taxi ten miles away to repair broken hydraulics on an Amish farm.
• A ten-year-old girl serves as a receptionist on Saturday mornings for the family’s retail furniture business. When not greeting customers, she files orders and computes financial statements with a small calculator.
In lower communities, children routinely work as hired help for Amish neighbors. One ten-year-old girl helped her aunt care for a toddler and a newborn, doing a range of chores from diapering the baby to preparing strawberries for canning. Her eight-year-old cousin helped an Amish neighbor run the farm stand—sorting produce, bagging groceries, and carrying purchases to shoppers’ cars. A young boy may work part-time for a neighbor, helping to milk cows or goats, or clean up an uncle’s shop on Saturday mornings.
Children whose parents work away from home are responsible for small enterprises such as raising pets, cleanup and repair projects, and gardening. A twelve-year-old girl understands how to provide child care for younger siblings or neighbors, how to bake a dozen loaves of bread, and when and how to plant strawberries. Children learn to work, and work hard, at an early age, preparing them to run their own homes, farms, or businesses.
Beyond on-the-job learning, one Amish man explained that any “technical training that is needed can be had. It is not uncommon to go to a local tech school for training on installing solar panels or accounting and so forth.” Other skills are self-taught. An Amish employee at an English factory said, “All our Amish engineers have only eight grades. But still they do OK. They built a new computerized router to cut holes in PVC dimension stock and outsourced the software writing. But they weren’t happy with it, so they will write their own ne
xt time, and I tell you, they will accomplish this. Hey, education is caught not taught. You can’t teach someone something they don’t want to know, and conversely you can’t keep them in the dark to stop them from learning what they need or want to.”46
Ending formal schooling by the age of fourteen provides youth with at least two years of apprenticeship before they begin regular employment. Typically, young people receiving outside income turn most of it over to their parents until they reach age eighteen (twenty-one in some groups) or marry. In return, parents cover the child’s debts, room, board, and clothing. Some young people work a short time in several jobs until they discover the work they most enjoy. Through apprenticeship, youth acquire skills and habits of mind that support an enterprising society.
Different Worlds, Different Aims
Iowa Amish teacher Samuel D. Guengerich argued in 1897 that “the righteousness which counts before God is neither sought nor found in the public or free schools; they are intended only to impart worldly knowledge, to ensure earthly success, and to make good citizens for the state.”47 Guengerich captured the Amish critique of public education in a single sentence. A state-devised education does not “count before God” because it is designed to “ensure earthly success,” and “make good citizens for the state.” Guengerich wanted an Amish education that would “count” in the eyes of God, one that made good members for his church-community.
Six decades later, minister Joseph Stoll echoed Amish anxiety about the threat of cultural assimilation: “How can we parents expect our children to grow up untainted by the world if we voluntarily send them into a worldly environment, where they associate with worldly companions, and are taught by men and women not of our faith six hours a day, five days a week, for the greater part of the year?”48 Indeed, an aim of public education is to integrate students from diverse cultural backgrounds into a common civic culture. Moreover, with its ideological content and compulsory attendance laws, public education is the most intruding arm of the state in the private lives of citizens.
Both Guengerich and Stoll understood that schooling is not a neutral enterprise. They knew that all education—public or private—involves the cultural transmission of particular values, beliefs, and dispositions. “All teaching,” says political scientist Rob Reich, “is a value-laden enterprise. Schools are ethically charged places. … Teachers cannot help transmitting certain values to students. … Curriculum construction is a process of exclusion as well as inclusion. … [In addition,] the so-called hidden curriculum of the school culture and role modeling of the adults, makes neutrality impossible.”49
State-sponsored education aims to impart academic knowledge as well as to cultivate civic skills and dispositions for good citizenship. American public education champions self-actualization, individual rights, and the freedom to construct one’s life without the restraints of tradition. Public education also promotes citizenship and a sense of allegiance to the ideals of equality and freedom.
Amish parents sensed that public education, as it evolved in the twentieth century, would likely separate children from their traditions and cherished values. Professional specialists—educated in worldly universities—would encourage Amish youth to maximize their potential by pursuing more education to “liberate” themselves from the shackles of parochialism. In a setting that champions individuality, Amish youth would become self-confident, arrogant, independent, and proud. By stirring aspirations and raising occupational hopes, teachers would steer Amish youth away from farm and family or at least would encourage restlessness. These outcomes of public education are antithetical to core Amish values of Gelassenheit, self-denial, humility, separation from the world, nonparticipation in politics, and a lifelong allegiance to the Amish church.
In contrast, Amish schools are designed to prepare youth for a successful life in the Amish community, not in mainstream society. By all accounts, Amish schools meet their objectives well by producing hard-working, self-motivated individuals who are adept at practical skills. Amish schools are not designed to set students on a track to become physical therapists, nuclear scientists, jazz musicians, ballet dancers, psychotherapists, or politicians. They do, however, provide a basic education for the entrepreneurs of some 12,000 Amish-owned small businesses in North America.
Amish schooling and apprenticeship gives even those who leave the Amish world a solid set of employable skills in the public job market. Moreover, Amish schools also affirm qualities some secular educators are once again coming to appreciate. They offer small-scale, community-based instruction that emphasizes individual responsibility and discipline. Amish children learn to take responsibility for their actions and to behave in a disciplined manner. They are accountable to their teachers and to their parents, and the schools themselves are accountable to a clearly defined, community-based authority.50
Advocates of personal autonomy may cringe at the limits of an Amish education. In response, one Amish man said, “Some people argue that Amish kids will never be a Picasso, Mozart, Einstein, etc. Whenever I hear that row, the thought crosses my mind that those people were not the products of an American education either. … What I am trying to say is that we don’t feel deprived because of only having an eighth grade education. And why spend all that time and money for a Cadillac when a pony cart will do just fine.”
The rejection of automobiles and public utility electricity in the first half of the twentieth century shaped Amish identity in profound ways. But the decision to operate private schools had an even deeper influence because the Amish were controlling the ideology that would shape the socialization of their children and exercising agency in organizing their own schools. Paradoxically, the sharper cultural separation embodied in their private school system developed at the same time that the Amish were becoming more entangled in the larger market economy. In chapters 15 through 17 we explore the entanglements resulting from their changing agricultural practices and their foray into business.
IV
EXTERNAL TIES
CHAPTER 15
AGRICULTURE
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In January 2001, Amish minister and farmer Rob Schlabach was worried about the precarious state of farming in Holmes County, Ohio. Fifteen years earlier the Amish owners of seven farms adjoining his had all earned their primary income from farming. Now only three of those families relied on agriculture. The families on the other farms still lived on the land, but they held off-farm jobs. “The common comradeship of working together with neighboring farms is getting scarce,” he noted, “and the farming skills that have been passed from generation to generation are now breaking up and disappearing. How sad! Plain People are having problems remaining a simple ‘people of the land.’” The shift from farming had produced new patterns of work. Schlabach lamented the weekend mentality of “Saturdays off for fun” and the fact that more Amish people were now interested in leisure, play, traveling, and shopping. “All of these are earmarks of the industrial lifestyle, and sad to say, it looks like that is where we are headed.”
* * *
Faith, Family, and Farming
The Amish have had a long love affair with the land, even calling farming “a religious tenet” and considering the tilling of soil a divine duty God directed in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 3:21). This spiritual connection to the soil is also rooted in the Amish experience in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where they and their Anabaptist ancestors had a reputation as innovative farmers known for their land stewardship and animal husbandry.1
Over the generations, the Amish have developed a strong conviction that the small family farm is the best place to raise children in the faith. One Amish publication flatly declares that farming “is the most ideal occupation for Christian families.” The author concedes that “not everyone must be a farmer, only that it is the most ideal.” Agriculture is revered because “farming allows us to be part of the cycle of life, death, and renewal that God planned in his wisdom. In our daily co
ntact with creation, we cannot help but stand in awe and wonder of God.”2 Equally important is the shared nature of family farming, in which “my work” and “your work” become blurred into “our work,” and children grow up learning to do chores and accept responsibility. This litany of praise for farming as the best vocation for family life and child rearing is reiterated dozens if not hundreds of times in Amish writings.3
Until the mid-twentieth century, Amish farming generally matched the pre-industrial image of a small family operation where wife, husband, and children work together as producers.4 In 1950 more than 90 percent of Amish households received their primary income from farming. Rob Schlabach’s lament of farming’s decline describes a trend that began to accelerate in the last quarter of the twentieth century. That crisis, in turn, reenergized traditional as well as new agricultural practices in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The story of Amish farming in America has three chapters—pre-1950, 1950–2000, and early twenty-first century—each marked by particular features.
Modest and Diversified before 1950
When the first Amish arrived in America, tilling, planting, and harvesting were done with hand tools and the power of oxen. Horses came into general use only after 1800. In the course of the nineteenth century, many aspects of field work—tilling, seeding, weeding, and harvesting—became mechanized with horse-drawn equipment. Large stationary steam engines powered threshing machines, sawmills, and grain mills. Prior to 1900, the farm technology of the Amish was similar to that of their English neighbors, and in some cases Amish farmers were among the first in their communities to adopt new machinery.5 Divergence from mainstream agriculture did not become a prominent feature of Amish farming until the first half of the twentieth century.
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