Train Up a Child: Old Order Amish and Mennonite Schools

CHAPTER 5. Mainstream Amish Schools

K chapter 5 L Mainstream Amish Schools The trend in education was toward television, evolution, sex teaching, and other modern worldly ideas in child instruction. These changes were certainly not conducive to the Amish way of life. —Uria R. Byler, School Bells Ringing Defining the Mainstream T alking about the Amish in the Holmes County settlement an hour away from her own, an Ashland Amish woman commented, “We always thought, ‘They’re Holmes County people, they’re higher than us,’ but they’re common [not so different].” The earliest settlers in the Ashland community moved west out of the Holmes County area because they were concerned about “drift,” or increasing worldliness in the settlement. Today, home to the largest settlement of Amish in the world, Holmes and neighboring Wayne County offer challenges to Old Order Amish residents that church-communities in more isolated areas do not face. First, there is the large Old Order population. The Ohio Amish Directory lists 183 church districts, 5,275 families, and 24,101 Amish individuals . And the numbers are growing. As the editors of the newest edition of the Ohio Amish Directory (Wengerd 2000) note, the previous edition, published in 1996, listed only 156 districts; in the four years between editions, the number of families has increased 12 percent and the number of individuals 20 percent. Moreover, given that the Ohio Amish Directory 104 K train up a child L does not include the Swartzentruber churches, the growth is likely much greater. As population increases, the difficulties of maintaining an agrarian lifestyle multiply. Land prices have risen steadily, causing increasing numbers of Amish to search for employment off the land in various agriculturally related businesses and in enterprises that cater to the growing tourist presence . Indeed, according to one report, at least 60 percent of the Amish in Holmes County are involved in work off the farm.1 The “Directory” section of The Guidebook to Amish Communities & Business Directory (Garrett 1996) lists a wide variety of Amish-owned businesses in the Holmes County vicinity, including a manufacturer of hydraulic and cable brakes for horse-drawn vehicles, several country stores and bakeries, furniture makers and wood workers, an axel manufacturer, a dealer in chainsaws and logging supplies, and dry goods dealers. The chapter in the Guidebook on“Communities”labelstheHolmes/Waynesettlement“touristfriendly” (Garrett 1996, 96). Levi Miller (1992, 58) concurs, noting that Holmes County has become the second largest tourist attraction in Ohio and that some Amish families have even started hosting dinners for tourists within their homes. The growth in the Old Order Amish population has led to disagreements within the settlement and a diversity of lifestyles that are labeled Old Order. Each church-community has chosen for itself where to draw the boundary between the church and the world and how to define nonconformity . From the main body of the Old Order Amish, schisms have resulted in the Swartzentruber Amish, the Andy Weaver Church, Dans Gmee, the Beachy Amish-Mennonites, and the New Order (Kraybill 1994). As Kreps, Donnermeyer, and Kreps note, “These groups differ on many issues, including clothing, use of farm and shop machinery, indoor and outdoor plumbing and other household conveniences, safety devices on buggies, and conditions under which members may interact with the non-Amish” (1997, 28). There are Old Order Amish homes with indoor plumbing, kerosene refrigerators, linoleum floors, and battery-powered living room floor lamps next to Amish homes that have none of these things. While the Swartzentruber Amish do not permit their members to work in town or to work as wage laborers in the regular employ of a non-Amish firm, members of other groups can be found staffing and running businesses that serve a wide variety of commercial needs and Amish and non-Amish clientele. All are devoted to the Anabaptist ideals of their forebears, yet all have realized these differently as they continue to de- fine themselves in opposition to non–Old Order society and to the groups with which they are not in fellowship. The multiplicity of Old Order Amish identities exacerbates the tendency on the part of many, both Amish and non–Old Order, to look at the different groups and to identify some as more “traditional”—even more “Amish”—than others. This is understandable, for as groups have split from the main body of the Old Order Amish church, they have tended to characterize themselves...