growth of Amish schools demonstrates
that the loss of one room schools to
consolidation isn’t always in keeping
with community values. And the efforts of many current Amish educators,
who are striving to improve student
test scores, are serving to dispel the
idea that a one room school education in and of itself is a second rate
education.
Amish schools are nothing new.
Delbert Farmwald, in his book “History
and Directory of Indiana Amish Parochial
Schools” (Study Time Publishers; 2004)
has written an extensive history of the
Amish parochial schools dating back to
the early days of LaGrange County. The
concern has always been to ensure, as
Jerry E. Miller says, “that the church,
the home, and the school should be
teaching the same thing.” One of the
primary issues that concerned the
Amish community was consolidation and the closing of the one room
schools. Consolidation meant a greater
emphasis on sports, movies, and the
study of certain areas of science that
were not in keeping with the Amish
Church.
When a $60,000 bond issue was
approved in 1928, to construct a multiroom school building in Honeyville, a
number of the Amish in Eden Township expressed concern. Their fear
was that even more one-room schools
would be closed. According to Delbert
Farmwald’s history, Ora Cole began
to actively solicit the support of the
Amish community promising that if he
was elected township trustee he would
stop consolidation and the building
of the Honeyville School. As a result,
enough Amish in the township registered to vote and Cole was elected.
Unfortunately, Cole’s campaign promises quickly came to naught, because
consolidation and the work on the
Honeyville School went on without
skipping a beat. What many in the
Amish community feared came to pass.
By the end of the 1929-30 school year
all of the remaining one-room schools
in Eden Township were closed. No
doubt these broken promises prompted
the Amish leaders in LaGrange County
to petition the State Legislature to permit their children to drop out of school
at the end of the eighth grade. Farm-
wald says that there is no record of any
response from the State of Indiana.
In October of 1944, twelve Amish
men attended a Middlebury School
Board meeting to request that their
children be excused from certain activities and studies. The group also read to
the Board a letter that had been sent to
the State Superintendent of Public Instruction. Of particular concern to the
Amish leaders were physical education
classes, movies, and some parts of the
science curriculum. The School Board
responded by saying that the curriculum was required by law, but the
movies were not. The Board stated that
Amish children would not be required
to view the movies.
On January 2, 1947, the Middlebury School Board announced its
decision to close Sanitary School, the
last one-room school in the township
which was located near the LaGrange
County line. Three months later, Abe
Lehman encouraged the school board
to keep Sanitary School open. The
board’s response was that there were
only four Amish families in the Sanitary district along with children from
The Hometown Treasure · September ‘12 · pg 23