Word: amish
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...encroachment of public schooling on the lives of American children has now been checked by the decision in the Supreme Court against compulsory schooling for Amish children...
Going English. To achieve this lonely differentness, the Amish have had to keep family and community close-knit-an important factor in last week's decision. Unlike the Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana Amish communities, all large and long established, the Amish settlers in the rolling countryside around New Glarus (pop. 1,400) are a group of about 150 newcomers who began to drift into the area...
...first, they not only sent their children to the public grade schools, a longtime Amish practice, but some parents permitted their teen-agers to attend two years of high school as well. Still, they feared that high school would tempt their children to "go English," as the Amish refer to slipping into worldly ways. The "English" world is non-Amish society; among themselves most Amish speak the German dialect known as Pennsylvania Dutch, and in religious services they use High German. New Glarus Farmer Wallace Miller, father of twelve and one of the respondents in the Supreme Court case, explained...
William Ball, the Roman Catholic attorney who argued the case for the Amish, pointed out to the court that the children's education does not cease when they leave school: their families continue to train them in an "education for life," emphasizing the "classical wisdom" of producing moral men. The state had contended that Amish children who left school before the statutory age of 16 could become burdens to the community. Testimony from previous appeals showed otherwise. No Amish teen-ager in New Glarus had ever been arrested for any crime; no Amish at all had an illegitimate birth...
...court made clear that it was the strict faith of the Amish-and not mere "secular" disagreement with society's educational goals-that enabled the religious freedom guarantee to override the state's right to set educational standards. It also noted that the Amish sought exemption only from high school, not grade school. The decision will be small comfort to more modern communalists and dropouts who would like to get away from it all and educate their children in their own ways. Even so hallowed an anti-Establishment position as that of Henry David Thoreau, the court noted...