Schools and Home Training
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Statewide Amish board meetings are held annually for members of the school boards, committeemen, church officials, and others, including teachers and parents who are interested. Statewide committee members are elected at these meetings. These occasions attract six to eight hundred people, who usually meet in a big barn. State communities may appoint several subcommunities. When vital issues are at stake, a small committee meets with public education officials to exchange views. The Pennsylvania “Amish Church School Committee,” established in 1937, has attempted to clarify the Amish position on education to state education officials. The Old Order Book Society (Gordonville, Pa.) was organized to select books suitable for use in Amish schools. This committee also functions as a treasury to help provide funds for the establishment of new schools.

None of the arguments in favor of school consolidation are acceptable to the Amish. The long struggle to retain the small school in their community and to allow it to function on a human scale rather than on an organizational scale has centered on four major issues (1) the location of the school, (2) the training and qualification of the teacher, (3) the number of years of schooling provided, and (4) the content of the curriculum. The controversy in the various states has differed, but the major issues have remained the same.

High school comes at a time in the life of the Amish young person when cultural isolations is most important for the development of personality and social maturity. During this period the young person is learning to understand his own individuality within the boundaries of his society. As an adolescent he is learning for the first time to relate to a group of peers beyond his family. As with most adolescents, he is testing his powers against his parents and the rules of the community. In the eyes of the community, it is important that his group of peers include only other Amish persons. If he acquires competence in the “English” culture at this stage, he will very likely be lost to the Amish fellowship. The period during which the parents loosen their direct control, but in which the community has not yet assumed much control, is too critical a time to expose the young person to outside influences.

The U.S. Supreme Court settled the long-standing controversy on May 15, 1972. In Wisconsin v. Yoder, The court rules that the states may not constitutionally force the Amish to send their children to public high school. The context of the suit arose at New Glarus, in Green County, Wisconsin, where a new Amish settlement was being formed. Three Amish fathers were arrested in the fall of 1968 on complaint of the local school administrator that they had failed to enroll their three children, Frieda Yoder and Barbara Miller, both fifteen years old, and Vernon Yutzy, aged fourteen, in high school. All had completed the eighth grade in the public schools. Wisconsin law required attendance until the child’s sixteenth birthday.

Early Training. The Amish know that early childhood training and community control of education are absolutely essential for the maintenance of a distinctive way of life. Worldly success and worldly standards are a threat to Amish society when their children are placed in schools that promote these values. For over one hundred years the Amish remained with the public schools system. They did not establish their own schools until they were threatened by the monocultural public school, which in essence would not grant them an identity of their own and would not permit them to be raised as both Amishmen and Americans. The most uncertain period began with the onset of the school consolidation movement (1937) and continued until the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Wisconsin v. Yoder upheld the Amish school system in 1972. This period of defensive structuring, in which the Amish had to cope with an uncertain future, challenged their institutions and resulted in greater cultural vigor.

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