[EDLING:2192] Amish teaching is diverse

[Francis M Hult]

Via lgpolicy...

> Amish Teaching Is Diverse, Author Discovers
> By Mary Ann Zehr
> 
> An anthropologist who visited Amish schools in five states has published a
> scholarly book showing such schools are not frozen in time and are diverse
> in how they educate children to live apart from the world. In Train Up a
> Child: Old Order Amish and Mennonite Schools, Karen M.  Johnson-Weiner, an
> associate professor of anthropology at the State University of New York
> College at Potsdam, provides insight into a sector of private schooling
> that, boosted by high birth rates among Amish, is one of the
> fastest-growing in the country. The book is based on her observations in
> 38 private schools and interviews with 142 people from eight Amish
> communities and one Old Order Mennonite community.
> 
> The Amish are 21st-century people who have to explore modernity, Ms.
> Johnson-Weiner said in an interview last week. The communities continue to
> evaluate their role of how they will react to the dominant society. Paring
> back or adding school subjects or selecting textbooks viewed as more
> relevant reflect changes in how Amish people view their role in the
> broader world, she says in her book. The fatal school shooting of five
> Amish girls in Lancaster County, Pa., by a deranged intruder on Oct. 2
> drew the worlds attention to a single one-room Amish school. Three of the
> five other girls who were wounded have since returned to classes,
> according to a statement released Nov. 21 by an accountability committee
> handling money donated in response to the tragedy. One girl remains
> hospitalized, and the other is semicomatose at home and likely to have
> lifelong disabilities. The local community razed the West Nickel Mines
> School and is preparing to build a new school on a different site.
> 
> Alternative Model
> 
> Amish schools are important to study, said Donald B. Kraybill, a
> sociologist and an expert on the Amish at Elizabethtown College in
> Pennsylvania, because they suggest an alternative model of small,
> parent-controlled schools that can be very effective in educating young
> people at a very low cost. They don't have big bureaucracies or
> superintendents or boards of trustees dictating their curriculum.
> Graduates of Amish schools with only 8th grade educations, he noted, have
> been successful in managing businesses with more than $1 million in annual
> sales, such as hardware stores. Mr. Kraybill acquired Train Up a Child,
> scheduled for release Dec. 15, as the first in a series of books on
> Anabaptist and Pietist groups he is editing for the Johns Hopkins
> University Press.
> 
> The Amish and the Mennonites have their roots in 16th-century Anabaptist
> groups in Europe that rejected infant baptism. The Amish population,
> 200,000 in the United States, doubles in size every two decades, and most
> attend any of the 1,500 private schools run by their own people, according
> to Mr. Kraybill. Charles L. Glenn, the dean of Boston University's school
> of education and a researcher on private education, said the book will
> help non-Amish get over some erroneous assumptions about the Christian
> denomination. Basing his comments on the preface and first chapter of the
> book, Mr.  Glenn said he hadn't known that Amish schools are basically a
> modern invention. Many Amish communities first created schools, which go
> only through 8th grade, in the 1950s and 1960s in reaction to the
> consolidation of rural public schools.
> 
> In addition, Mr. Glenn said, he hadn't realized Amish communities differed
> so much from each other in how they interact with the broader world. Its
> easy to help kids learn how to be Amish and have no contact with the
> world, but to help them be Amish and have friends who are not Amish and
> work in the mainstream economy is an interesting challenge, he said.
> 
> Not Fundamentalists
> 
> Ms. Johnson-Wiener spent much of 2002 on the road, accompanied by Amish
> teachers, visiting schools run by Old Order groups. Such Anabaptist groups
> are distinctive because they adhere to an Ordnung, German for code of
> conduct, that each community agrees to abide by. The code varies from
> community to community. Lessons are generally in English, though some
> teachers more than others use the German dialect spoken by Amish for
> instruction. English is the language that Amish children use to
> communicate with people outside their communities and to correspond with
> other Amish since their dialect is not a written language. Ms.
> Johnson-Weiner converses in the language. Amish schools also teach
> standard German, which Amish use in church and to read the Bible. The most
> conservative schools are run by Swartzentruber Amish in upstate New York.
> Unlike the other Amish studied, that group doesn't permit its members to
> work for non-Amish employers or even sell goods at public farmers markets.
> 
> The author tells how children in Swartzentruber Amish schools study only
> reading, spelling, and arithmetic and use McGuffey's Readers from the late
> 19th century with antiquated English words and situations. The
> Swartzentruber Amish have responded to modernity by increasingly trimming
> the curriculum to the most basic subjects, she writes. At the same time,
> Amish in several small settlements that are less conservative teach art,
> health, geography, and history, in addition to the basics of arithmetic,
> reading, spelling, and penmanship. The more progressive Amish schools
> teach English in a way that enables children to use it well while
> interacting with outsiders, Ms. Johnson-Weiner observed.
> 
> She found that all schools teach Amish values, such as diligence and
> teamwork, but they differ in whether they teach religion overtly. Most
> Amish believe its the role of the church and the family--not the
> school--to teach religion, so in some schools, teachers don't even lead
> prayer, according to Ms. Johnson-Weiner. At the same time, teachers in the
> more progressive schools discuss Bible verses with children. It surprised
> me when religion was overt in the more progressive schools--to go in and
> see bulletin boards about Jesus, Ms. Johnson-Weiner said in the telephone
> interview. For most of the times I've visited Amish homes and known Amish
> people, I've been with less progressive groups. The Amish aren't
> fundamentalists. They don't believe you can have this personal sense of
> salvation.