Curriculum
Curriculum varies by region, state, and affiliation.22 Regional Amish educational committees generally maintain contact with their respective state departments of education to file attendance reports and keep tabs on any new regulatory statutes. Several Amish publishers provide textbooks, teaching manuals, and workbooks that are culturally relevant for Amish schools. The largest is Pathway Publishers, located in Aylmer, Ontario, which also publishes the monthly Blackboard Bulletin and many other resources for teachers. Schools typically maintain a small library, but teachers and pupils in the higher groups often use the resources of their local public library.
Education for children with disabilities and special needs—psychological, mental, physical—is provided in various ways: classes in public schools or in regular Amish schools, special Amish schools, mobile therapists funded by local public school systems, or some combination of these. As the Amish school movement matured, a parallel “special school” movement emerged in the 1970s and 80s.23 The first Amish special schools were established in Pennsylvania in 1975, in Indiana in 1983, and in Illinois in 1983. By 2012 many Amish communities had developed schools and educational programs for special needs students. Some of the annual teachers meetings devote sessions to teaching students with special needs.
Religion
Outsiders are often surprised to learn that Amish schools do not explicitly teach religion. Although religious values permeate the school day, the curriculum does not include religion courses or Bible study.24 In fact, an explicit study of religion in school would cause several problems. It would shift authority for religious interpretation away from church and family, from male leaders to young single women, and from the community to the individual pupil. It could also cultivate an inquiring independence, which might spur critical-thinking youth to later challenge church authority. Finally, in Amish life, the Bible is to be accepted, not studied or dissected. An Amish leader put it this way: “With us, our religion is inseparable with a day’s work, a night’s rest, a meal, or any other practice; therefore, our education can much less be separated from our religious practices.”25
Nonetheless, some change-oriented communities do see their schools as reinforcing church teaching. An Amish bishop told a group of Indiana teachers, “God is the foundation of Amish education. The closer one adheres to God’s word and God’s principles when administering a system of teaching honor, respect, and discipline, the greater one’s probability of success.” He noted further that there can be “no neutral position with respect to good and evil. … [O]ur allegiance is with one or the other, and this is as true within the classroom as anywhere else.”26 Such Amish see their schools as vital to the well-being of the church.
The Diversity of Schooling
As more Amish schools were established, they developed along paths that reflect the diversity of their communities. In choosing to build or not build a school and in deciding which subjects to teach, which textbooks to use, and how the school day should be structured, local communities reinforce their particular identity and draw boundaries between themselves and the world, and other Amish groups.27
Traditional Schools
The Swartzentruber Amish, who represent about 7 percent of the Amish world, have the most traditional schools. The austere architecture of their schoolhouses—simple rectangular buildings without basements, closets, or indoor plumbing—reveal their strict notions of humility and simplicity. The exterior is generally unpainted wood, and the particleboard walls and floor inside are painted in typical Swartzentruber white and battleship gray. These one-room schools, heated by a wood stove, often have a wire strung from the stovepipe to the wall as a drying rack for wet mittens in the winter.
Students enter the classroom through an attached woodshed or perhaps directly from an outside door. Each window has a dark curtain that is tied to one side for illumination, and there are no lights, not even kerosene or propane lamps. The teacher’s desk, near the blackboard, faces the rows of children’s desks. A bench or a row of chairs in the front of the room marks where children sit when the teacher is “taking their class.” Schools do not have designated playgrounds. Instead, during recess students play ball games or fox and geese in a surrounding meadow that may well be used for grazing cattle during the summer.
Swartzentruber Amish children in Ohio leave the traditional-style Woodland School and head home for evening chores. Doyle Yoder
The role of the teacher illustrates how such schools reflect and reinforce the affiliation’s values. Swartzentruber teachers receive little or no training and do not expect to teach for more than a year or two, even if they enjoy it. School directors in these settlements often pay teachers as little as five dollars a day, nudging even those who enjoy teaching to give it up for marriage.
Swartzentruber schools provide children the basic literacy and math skills necessary in their highly traditional church-community. Parents do not often visit the school or pay much attention to school activities. There are no special school programs for parents and friends at holiday time. Schools, in short, are not very important in Swartzentruber life.
Indeed, these change-resistant Amish simply perpetuate the most basic educational practices of early twentieth-century rural public education. They use the same texts as their great-grandparents, including nineteenth-century McGuffey Readers, the 1919 Essentials of English Spelling, and the Strayer-Upton Arithmetic Series from the 1930s. Kept in print by Amish print shops, these textbooks immerse children in an early twentieth-century world, and shield them from modern events, technological advances, and religious and cultural pluralism. The language of instruction uses a simple, archaic vocabulary so that pupils can engage in basic interaction with non-Amish neighbors, but it screens them from too much worldly vocabulary and knowledge.28
Because the Swartzentrubers esteem old practices, change comes slowly in their schools. In fact, when they do make changes, they tend to step back in time rather than adopt any “modernisms” incongruent with their way of life. Children study German once a week in order to read the Bible and the Ausbund, but they do not study history, geography, or health—subjects that their great-grandparents would have studied when they attended public schools in the 1940s.29
This restricted curriculum reinforces the cultural isolation of the Swartzentruber community. Furthermore, their schools underscore the value of submission by remaining subordinate to church and family life. Teachers occasionally cancel classes for activities in the local neighborhood such as weddings or silo fillings. Parents sometimes keep scholars home to help with pressing chores, and even the teacher might send a substitute in her place so that she can participate in a quilting bee or help her family get ready for church.
Finally, pedagogy emphasizes rote learning over questioning in Swartzentruber schools, and children are not encouraged to work ahead or do extra lessons if they have finished the day’s tasks. At the same time, children learn early that working hard is more important than good grades. The teacher may record perfect scores on spelling tests, but she does not display them where others can see them, nor is there competition between students to see who can do the best. One young child, having just finished first grade, responded to an acknowledgement of her good English with “I’m an easy learner,” a matter-of-fact statement meant to dismiss praise.
Change-Oriented Schools
The schools of more progressive groups are quite different from those of the Swartzentrubers. The buildings themselves are larger and more elaborate. In northern Indiana, for example, most schoolhouses have two classrooms and a basement that serves as a play area in inclement weather or as a classroom where children can work in groups to practice spelling words or read with a visiting parent. Some of these schools have indoor plumbing, and some have an attached apartment where the teacher lives. Their amenities include bookshelves, a small library, a battery-run copy machine, and pressurized gas lanterns. The outside landscaping is tidy, with a crushed stone drivew
ay, a ball diamond, playground equipment, and a painted fence marking the school boundaries. In higher communities, teachers are paid fifty dollars a day plus any transportation costs. Monthly teachers meetings and special summer institutes provide venues to meet and learn from more experienced teachers.
In some settlements, schools are a center of Amish life. Parents and other community members stop by regularly, often bringing along younger siblings or visiting relatives. Visitors are welcomed with special songs, guest books, and bulletin boards. Schools present holiday programs and invite the entire church-community. Teachers might take children on field trips to local museums and invite parents to give talks or help with projects. Mothers regularly treat the schoolchildren to hot lunches or special snacks. A letter in the Budget reported that one teacher was surprised when her mother and sisters “walked in the school house with ice cream and cake.” The letter writer noted that “another hot meal” had been brought in a week earlier.30 Several schools in his community have “monotony breakers,” one Illinois writer reported. For one of these, pupils brought their lunches in unusual containers that included “a breadbox, a toy wheelbarrow, feed bag, and tea kettle.”31
These higher affiliations want schools to prepare their children for an Amish life, but one that is quite different from that of the Swartzentrubers. As one parent asserted, “Times change, and so education must change for the times.” These schools educate children to interact with the world, while at the same time teaching them to remain separate from it. As one Ohio teacher put it, “We expect our schools to provide a basic education for our children, [one] that is essential to our way of living and also to be able to communicate and make a living in the outside world.”
Schools in more liberal communities recognize change in the dominant society and try to mediate access to it, even preparing children for work outside their communities. In addition to English, German, and arithmetic, children study geography, American history, and some art, but they do so with textbooks produced by Pathway Publishers. Such texts help children acquire the language and other skills they might need for employment in English businesses, but they do it in ways that reinforce Amish values and behaviors. Teachers also expose pupils to a variety of cultures outside the boundaries of their church-communities. For example, one teacher in Indiana posted a map of the world that announced “five-and-a-half billion people live in more than 175 independent countries on six of the seven continents.”32
One school in Lancaster County has colorful streamers hanging from the ceiling and student artwork on the walls. A large poster showing a stylish baseball batter proclaims, “The task ahead of you is never as great as the power within you.” The small print reads, “Be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power” (Eph. 6:10). Another poster says, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you will land among the stars.” A large professionally printed map of the solar system hangs on another wall. The dust jackets of several books, including You Are Special by popular evangelical writer Max Lucado, are stapled on a bulletin board to encourage reading.
Children in a progressive Amish school practice singing for a parents’ program later that day. The teacher’s aide (left) and the teacher (right) direct the singing. Colored chalk drawings are on the blackboard. The two children in the foreground are preschool visitors. Lucian Niemeyer
Students study the parts of speech—nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections—as well as long and short vowels. Their academic subjects include reading, history, health, arithmetic, German, and English. Teachers may organize competitive exercises where three or four students race from the back door to the blackboard to be the first to write the answer to a question. Some schools in progressive affiliations even use textbooks from conservative Mennonite publishers that encourage evangelism of outsiders.
Schools in some liberal communities are preparing Amish children to compete economically with their English counterparts on a playing field that may be only marginally in the Amish world, if at all. This refashioning of what it means to be Amish is shocking to the most conservative groups.
Though Amish people do not agree on what constitutes a good Amish education, they are certain that a public high school education would harm their way of life. Virtually all Amish children end formal schooling with eighth grade, although a few continue studying on their own to obtain a GED or take occasional correspondence courses.
The Outcomes of Amish Schooling
Academic
Evidence from testing of students in Iowa and northern Indiana shows that eighth grade pupils in Amish schools in progressive communities scored more than one grade level above the national standard on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. These tests measure basic skills from third to eighth grade, including reading (vocabulary and comprehension), language (word analysis, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and usage), and mathematics (concepts, problems, and computations). A composite score measures student performance for comparative purposes. Amish third and fourth graders scored slightly below the national average, but fourth graders began to match the standard and eighth graders exceeded it. (See tables 14.1 and 14.2 for details.)33 This evidence suggests that Amish school students in higher communities are proficient in reading and writing English, and in basic math skills. There is no available evidence that indicates the skill levels of students in the most traditional Amish schools.
Are comparisons with national standards important? They are based on the assumption that if Amish pupils do not measure up to English pupils, the Amish school system is inferior. An Amish educational committee in northern Indiana thinks the standardized tests are helpful to “reveal our weak spots and point out [what] we need to work on.”34 “If somehow in the future, through negligence on our part, another school case [such as Yoder] should develop, which could well be expected, then we might lose all that we have struggled and worked for in the last fifty-five years. Therefore, our goal should be striving for improvement.”35
Amish schools do not teach basic science or technology. Instead, most emphasize an appreciation for nature within a worldview of divine creation. An Amish farmer said, “They tell me that in college you have to pull everything apart, analyze it, and try to build it up from a scientific standpoint. That runs counter to what we’ve been taught on mother’s knee” (emphasis added). Amish schools do not teach critical and reflective thinking skills aimed at developing individual autonomy. Teachers do not intentionally suppress independent thought nor do they cultivate or privilege it. Abstract and analytical modes of thought are not encouraged because they would breed impatience with the slow pace of Amish life and erode the authority of tradition.
There certainly are Amish students who, at their own initiative, pursue intellectually challenging questions, but Amish schools do not promote such traits in their curriculum or ethos. Intellectual curiosity is especially threatening in the more traditional groups. Some Amish students who pursue academic interests become self-taught scholars within their communities, while others leave the community for greater intellectual freedom.
Table 14.1. Scores of Iowa Amish Students on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills in 2009
Table 14.2. Scores of Indiana Amish Students on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills in 2011
Social
Not only do Amish schools teach basic skills and transmit cultural values, but they also perform significant social functions. They control the flow of ideas, build ethnic ties, and mediate relationships with outsiders—all of which enhance dependence on the church-community. Amish schools insulate children from rival explanations of reality and help to keep Amish ideology intact. By propagating ideas and values that undergird the ethnic social system, the schools reproduce the values and structures of Amish society.
Despite their limitations, Amish schools have ably passed on the traditions of faith to new generations. Indeed, schools are key to the growth and vitality of Amish life. Cloistered schools may not stretch Amish
awareness of the outside world, but they provide secure settings for the psychosocial development of children and instill in them a deep sense of identity and attachment to their community.
Each school is also a symbol of collective Amish identity and of the community’s commitment to a particular kind of education. Moreover, Amish affiliations define and separate themselves from other Amish groups by the type of schools they construct and support. Schools thus symbolize not only separation from the dominant society but also internal differentiation. They are institutions of identity and diversity. Perhaps most importantly, they mediate the access of their youth to the outside world by their choice of textbooks, the subjects they teach, and the prominence of English.
Amish Children in Public Schools
Although Amish schools quickly became the most common site of formal education in Amish society during the second half of the twentieth century, not all Amish children attend such schools. In a handful of communities, some Amish children attend schools run by Old Order Mennonites, and in a few others, Amish children attend public schools (but only through the eighth grade).36 Amish parents who support public schooling generally live in older settlements with long-standing patterns of collaboration with civic authorities. When families start a new settlement, they usually begin their own school instead of turning to the unknown public ones.
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