Though I had taken a degree in Religious Studies at Indiana University I had, at best, a very limited interest in the Anabaptists, the broader social movement that the Amish, Mennonites, and Hutterites arose out of. By the 1970s, however, as I moved away from Biblical Studies into the history of American Protestantism, I developed an interest, thanks to someone I was dating at the time who was a Friend, and thanks to the extensive course work I had done in cultural anthropology with its emphasis on culture and the ideologies of culture and the symbols, rituals, and behaviours that derived from this culture and its ideologies, in Quaker culture and ideology. I was intrigued by Quaker activism and the role Quakers and particularly Quaker women played in movements like the anti-slavery movement, the Indian rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and the various and sundry peace movements of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. It was very easy for someone as anthropologically and hence culturally inclined as myself to see the central role Quaker culture and ideology played in such activism.
It was Quakers who eventually stirred within me an interest in the Anabaptists. I was interested in pacifism and both Quakers and Anabaptists were pacifist if sometimes differently pacifist. Some of the more “traditional” Anabaptists were more non-resistant pacifists than peace activist pacifists like many of the Goshen College Mennonite crowd. Additionally, the inability of the activism of the 1960s to change the world in economically and politically meaningful ways gave me an intellectual appreciation for Anabaptist separatism and the political and cultural theology of John Howard Yoder as reflected in and enunciated in his book The Politics of Jesus. This interest in Anabaptism and Yoder, an appreciative if critical one, was always more of that of an observer than a participant since, when it comes to religion, I have never been a joiner and have never been interested in being a joiner, and, when it comes to politics, I am also more of an observer than a joiner. In the end I have always been more of a secularist, an empiricist, and a realist who understands that trying to change the world for what one thinks is the better is invariably and ultimately a Sisyphean enterprise and that generally speaking when change does occur the new boss is not that much different from the old boss. Additionally, I have long found a secular Calvinism with its notion that humans as deeply fallable, a secular Calvinism I derived from the Niebuhr’s, more compelling than the utopian idealism of Quakerism, the separatist utopian idealism of Yoder, the capitalist authoritarian oligarchy masquerading as democracy idealism of right wing White Protestantism and Catholicism and their economic elite masters, and the we know the purpose of life or the direction of history and we will get you to our utopia whether you like it or not of a host of theocratic monotheistic religious groups and a host of secular political and economic movements like Marxism and neoliberalism.
Recently, I encountered the Amish again when I picked up and read a copy of Children in Amish Society: Socialisation and Community Education (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Case Studies in Education and Culture series, 1971) by the late Temple University sociologist John Hostetler and the now retired University of Michigan ethnographer Gertrude Huntington, a book which focuses on an important sub discipline of sociology, socialisation, and an important sub discipline of cultural anthropology, enculturation. Hostetler’s and Huntington’s monograph, written while the tensions between various American states and the Amish over school consolidation were still high, tells the tale of the response of the Old Order Amish, the Amish sect the monograph focuses on, to and resistance toward the mania for school consolidation afoot, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, in rural America. The Amish were uncomfortable, as Hostetler and Huntington note, with school consolidation because it, from the Old Order Amish point of view, had a negative impact on “traditional” rural Amish face-to face culture and the Amish way of life. There were also tensions between the Amish and several American states over school leaving. From the Old Order Amish point of view schooling, as opposed to the more practical education for Amish rural agricultural and agricultural related life, should end at the eighth grade. Tensions arose between the Amish and “the English” because many states had laws which inhibited school leaving before age 16 and in some cases later.
In their monograph Hostetler and Huntington explore the rise of Amish schools as early as the 1920s in response to rural school consolidation. They explore how these schools, elementary and vocational, schools Amish youth attended until they were able to legally leave school, and both the product of compromises with American state officials over school consolidation, reflected Amish culture and its key or central ideologies in the 1970s and were embedded in the Amish life cycle. They explore the role Amish teachers, who, as Hostetler and Huntington put it, were qualified to teach in Amish schools because they were, from the Amish point of view, embedded in Amish culture and the Amish way of life, though they were not certified to teach from state school officials points of view—something that also caused tensions between the Amish and several American states—played in Amish schools. They explore the material culture of Amish schools and how that school material culture reflected the broader culture and ideology of Amish society.
But Hostetler’s and Huntington’s tale is not only an analytical and descriptive one. It is also an apologetic and polemical one. Hostetler and Huntington, writing during a period where culture and personality studies were still in vogue particularly in cultural anthropology, gave Amish students a series of tests, including a culturally reconfigured version of the standardised tests given in public schools, which showed that Amish students had scores similar to and in some cases better than those of pubic school students on several school subjects. They also note that Amish students who were in public schools, particularly public high schools, were more likely to leave the Amish fold compared to those who attended Amish elementary and vocational schools, foregrounding, in the process, how Old Order Amish concerns that creeping modernity with its one size fits all norms and values was having a negative impact on Amish life and Amish culture were indeed valid. As a result, they argue for a more mosaic approach to education, one that respects cultural diversity, including conservative religious cultural diversity, does not hinder the educational attainments of outsider and separatist groups like the Amish, and functions to successfully integrate Amish students into the practical aspects of Amish rural life, aspects like self-discipline, self-respect, and vocational training, allowing them, in the process, to be quite successful in the context of Amish culture. They generalise this argument asserting that similar culturally sensitive approaches to the education of American First Peoples, Blacks, and Hispanics, for example, could improve the schooling outcomes of these groups.
Hostetler’s and Huntington’s book, one impacted by the increasing popularity and influence of the culture of pluralism, one of whose hearths was Boasian cultural anthropology, in the US and beyond, raises a host of fascinating questions. Hostetler and Huntington note that Amish education is non-critical, at least of Amish culture and the Amish way of life, and that it is not conducive to the artistic life or the acquisitive life raising the question of whether schooling without a critical sensibility is really an education at all and whether it is possible to survive in a world where acquisitiveness is increasingly central without schooling for acquisitiveness. They note that Amish society and culture is authoritarian raising the question of whether even a more agape oriented patriarchal authoritarian schooling like that of the Old Order Amish is consistent with what education should be in a putative democratic society. They note that Amish education is resistant to some forms of science and technology raising the question of whether schooling without science and technological education is useful and acceptable in a nation and in a world where basic science and technological education is essential because both are central aspects of the world we live in and labour in and a world that changes because of the centrality of each to the world we live and work in, something foregrounded by the anti-intellectual reactions of many in response to scientific suggestions on how to protect oneself during a pandemic. They praise the idea and ideal of e pluribus unum but one inevitably wonders, a la Emile Durkheim, whether it really is possible to have the one amidst the cultural and ideological diversity of the many particularly when the divide is as seemingly wide as that between the Amish and “the English” and the anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, authoritarian, and intolerant Christian Right and secular, more tolerant, and more democratic America. They note that Amish culture is a “traditional” pre-industrial culture which is more kin centred, face-to face and oral in communication form, but the question invariably arises whether such a culture can continue to survive and thrive in a core nation world where the population is ever growing, agricultural land is becoming ever scarcer, industrial farms are ever increasing, and rational-efficient bureaucratic rules, to deal with increasing population and increasing bureaucratic complexity, are ever more the norm.
All that said, there were some policy proposals Hostetler and Huntington suggested that I found interesting and even compelling. I found their defence of Amish vocational education interesting. I think that since the 1980s too much emphasis has been placed on high school graduates attending liberal arts colleges and multiversities. I think there should be greater emphasis on post high school vocational education and apprenticeships for those who understandably are not particularly interested in the schooling liberal arts colleges and multiversities offer. Beyond policy, I found it interesting that the Amish, when faced with school consolidation, didn’t whinge, didn’t whine about taxes for public schools, didn’t play the victim, like so many contemporary right wing Christians do these days. They simply built their own alternative schools, literally, to serve their cultural needs when necessary. Now that is what I call cowboying and cowgirling up. Anyway, one has to admire a group like the Old Order Amish, a religious group that doesn't try to shove its parochial values down your throat whether you want them or not or like them or not.
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