Many Amish children don’t go to high school. One woman hopes to change that

This article was originally published on Feb. 22, 2024.

The lights dim at a community center in Akron, and a small crowd falls silent as about a dozen ballerinas take the stage.

They’re not dressed in pink tutus and pointe shoes. Instead, they wear black Amish dresses, their hair tied into bonnets.

And they don’t dance to classical music either. They’re moving to tunes from the ‘70s. American Pie, Spirit in the Sky and Wild World echo through the auditorium.

The songs were chosen carefully: all were playing on the radio the year the Supreme Court made a decision that changed the lives of Amish children across the country.

Wisconsin v. Yoder

In the 1972 case Wisconsin v. Yoder, the court ruled that Amish children don’t have to go to school past the eighth grade. Parents’ freedom of religion, it said, outweighs a state interest in education.

“[The Amish] believe that education’s aim should be the life of goodness, not the life of the intellect, the making of a good man, not the making of a good American life,” argued attorney William Ball on behalf of three Amish and Mennonite parents. “They believe that this life of goodness rejects the world of technical cunning and instead embraces wisdom.”

This belief holds true in Amish communities today, where many children go to school through the eighth grade in one- or two- room schoolhouses, often taught by teachers with an eighth grade education.

“The core understanding behind it is that the parents should guide the education,” said Marcus Yoder (no relation to the court case), the executive director of the Amish and Mennonite Heritage Center in Berlin, Ohio.

He said the Amish deeply value their historic faith, family and community, and their view toward education reflects those priorities.

“When it comes to education, you know, yes, everybody needs to get a good education, learn to read, learn the basics,” he said. “But then you need to learn to become a good community member. And so for many of them, that's why they don't go to high school or college.”

That’s not to say Amish people don’t value learning, he said. Informal education is often encouraged.

“Some of my Amish friends,” Yoder said, “they have the equivalent of the best PhDs in their field, but it's all learned by themselves.”

However, Torah Bontrager, the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Amish Heritage Foundation and a non-practicing Amish woman herself, argues this type of learning is no substitute for formal education.

She thinks Amish kids, like all children, should have access to education, and she’s making her case with the help of a ballet.

Torah Bontrager’s Story

On stage, Bontrager shares the story of her schooling in between dance numbers.

After graduating from the eighth grade, she remembers crying while her younger siblings got ready for school.

“I cried because I couldn't go,” she said. “And I couldn't let anyone see me cry because that's a sign of rebellion.”

In Amish communities like the one she grew up in, Bontrager said kids like her aren’t just discouraged from pursuing further education.

“It’s 100% off the table,” she said. “You do not go to school after the eighth grade. I mean, to even think about it is heresy.”

In her eyes, the denial of formal schooling was a means to hold her back, to prevent her from questioning her faith and culture, and to keep her tied to an abusive family.

So, when she was 15 years old, she ran away from her family in the middle of the night, with hopes of pursuing an education.

But her path forward wasn’t easy.

“The first semester of freshman year, one of the classes was chemistry, and the teacher was talking about H2O, and I raised my hand and asked, what's H2O?” Bontrager remembers. “And everybody looked at me and then started laughing.”

She went on to earn her high school equivalency degree and graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in philosophy.

Movement for change

Now, she’d like to help others do the same, but says many are missing so much schooling that even a GED is out of reach.

“I hear these stories, from Amish people coming up to me saying, ‘I want to be able to do this, I want to be able to do that, but I've had to give up,” she said.

She thinks, to truly achieve that, Wisconsin v. Yoder needs to be overturned or nullified, and that states should codify the right to an education in their constitutions. But that will require support outside of Amish communities, and many people don’t even know this issue exists.

So she’s raising awareness with a ballet choreographed to 70s music.

“How do we get people in our neighborhoods, our classmates, neighbors, friends, community, how do we get them to talk about this case?” she said. “Doing it through the performing arts is the perfect way because everybody can take something from the performance and talk about it.”

After the show, that’s exactly what the audience does, murmuring to each other as they exit the theater.

Bontrager plans to take the performance to as many places as possible, hoping that eventually these murmurs spur action.

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