The Right to Be Different

In 1968 three farmers in New Glarus, Wis., refused to enroll their 14- and 15-year-old children in the local public high school. They were fined $5 each* for violating Wisconsin's compulsory-school-attendance law. A small case, but a crucial one. The three farmers--Jonas Yoder, Wallace Miller and Adin Yutzy--were Amish. They had kept their children out of high school as a matter of religious conscience, because the Amish eschew too much worldly knowledge. Total pacifists, they could not even personally fight the convictions; by the strict tenets of their faith, a court suit would violate Jesus' injunction to "turn the other cheek."

Other Christians decided, on their behalf, that meekness had its limits. A small group called the National Committee for Amish Religious Freedom --including among its members a Roman Catholic, a Lutheran and some sympathetic ex-Amish--took up the case. Last week in the Supreme Court, they won a significant Constitutional victory. In a 7-0 decision, the court upheld a 1971 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that the state's compulsory-education law violated the Amish right to religious freedom. Justice William O. Douglas filed a partial dissent because two of the three children had not been consulted for their own views.

Hippie Heroes. Although Wisconsin v. Yoder was the first Supreme Court case in the long history of the Amish in the U.S., the Amish have always been a people apart, at odds with society. Their founder, Jakob Ammann, was a Mennonite bishop in 17th century Switzerland. After Ammann clashed with the sect's leaders over fine points of observance and demanded strict excommunication of backsliders, he and his followers broke away in 1693 and became the Amish. They sought refuge in America after William Penn's colony became a haven of religious freedom.

Over the years, as they spread into other states and increased their numbers to about 60,000, the Amish have still clutched that religious freedom doggedly. As one result, they can stand as heroes to laissez-faire conservatives on the one hand and to hippie-type communal dropouts on the other. Though they are farmers, they steadfastly refuse farm subsidies. They do not need, or want, welfare payments of any kind. They refuse to pay Social Security taxes or accept Social Security benefits: care of the elderly, they insist, is their religious duty. They do not want to grow rich. When oil was discovered on some Amish farms in Kansas, the owners sold the farms and moved elsewhere. Most Amish communities forbid the ownership (though not the occasional use) of automobiles, tractors and telephones. Emergency use of electricity may be permitted, but radio and television are not. They farm organically. Their consumption is so inconspicuous that merchants complain about their thrift.

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 in 1964.

At 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 other Amish objections to high school: "We like our children to learn the three Rs, and the public schools were getting away from that. And then we don't approve of teaching certain things, like evolution or some [competitive] sports."

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 or accepted any public assistance.

The 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, was "philosophical and personal rather than religious," and would not be enough to allow a child to escape the long arm of the truant officer.

* The minimum penalty in this test case. Had appeals faded, they would have been liable to daily indictments and more severe penalties.

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