As I rode through the farm country of Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York over the next ten days I had frequent evidence of the surprising expansion of the Amish population. Amish families own and operate a surprisingly large proportion of the farms in this region. The Amish have been affectionately portrayed in the media and there is no doubt they are having an amazingly positive effect on agricultural economy in this and other regions as are their less strict MennoniteWri neighbors (the Amish are a Mennonite sub-sect). The Amish really do farm with minimal mechanical help, dress in 19th century garb, speak a German dialect among themselves, have very large families who tend to stay in the fold, drive buggies, avoid being photographed, hold themselves aloof from the modern world and from the non-Amish population ("the English"). Their farms and homes are spare, beautiful, and productive.

But, and to me, it is a big but, this all happens, in my opinion, at the expense of basic human rights. As a matter of freedom of religious practice the Amish have gotten their children exempt from the ordinary requirements of universal education: the children are taught with antique "primers" in homes or one-room schoolhouses by slightly older Amish girls whose only education has been going through the same educational process themselves. This education provides basic literacy and numeracy as well as a healthy dose of sect indoctrination and continues only through age 13 or 14. Because of their intentional isolation from the rest of society, including complete deprivation of exposure to literature, art, most music, dance, popular culture, news, and the rest of the human world around them, Amish children are being, in my opinion, subjected to one of the the worst kinds of of systematic oppression and abuse. They are being subjected to the slavery of ignorance.

Of course individual Amish would deny this, including individual Amish children. No doubt they believe that their commitment to their way is a matter of choice, preference and consent. But consent is meaningless unless it is informed consent. Amish children (and adults, too, especially women, for that matter) are not only being kept ignorant, they are also being systematically being denied the ability to develop even rudimentary analytical or critical thinking skills. They do not even have the routine opportunity to meet or talk to people who have these skills.

The conformity and obedience to the Amish Way (known as the Ordnung) which can be observed by a tourist like myself is tyrannically enforced by a truly medieval process known as shunning. Any Amish person who departs from the Ordnung widely enough to annoy the elders of the sect may be subjected to shunning. This means that the other members of the sect from that point until the formal shunning fatwa is lifted are forbidden from having ANY further contact or interaction with the shunned person, on pain of being shunned themselves.

As a person who himself has been and continues to be subject to family and community shunning because of my non-conformity, I have a poignant awareness of how painful and inconvenient this is even for a highly educated and resourceful person. Just imagine how painful and truly impossible to contemplate this is for an Amish person whose entire world and experience is limited to the community by which he or she is being shunned.

Apparently some more-liberal Mennonite groups provide some support to Amish people who want to explore their lives beyond the straitened opportunities provided by The Ordnung. But I think the general population of the outside world (particularly international human rights organizations) needs to begin to examine the Amish way and the human rights violations it is apparently based upon. In particular, I call upon the legislatures in the states which exempt Amish and similar groups from compulsory education to examine this policy. If anyone out there is aware of an advocacy group that is already interested in this issue, or might be likely to take it on, I hope you will let me know.

One day on the ride I stopped at an Amish farm that had a farm-stand to see if I could make a little human connection along the lines illustrated by this blog. At the stand there was an Amish mother and 6 or 7 children under 8. One of the little girls looked at me with such intelligence, good will, and curiosity (this is the picture for this post. You have to imagine it. The mom refused to permit an actual picture.). This lovely, vital creature cannot grow up to be a weatherman on tv, a vet, a writer, a traveler. She cannot be anything but an oppressed and exhausted farm worker like her mother and all the mothers before her mother. This just cannot be allowed in the land of the free, no matter how quaint and picturesque the Amish lifestyle looks to tourists. Let us act.