From Consolidation to Confrontation: Strategic Action, Sacred Boundaries, and the Emergence of Amish Parochial Schools

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 22: Sociological and Social Theory

Abstract

The emergence of Old Order Amish parochial schools in the mid-twentieth century is often viewed as a story of religious adaptation and quiet cultural resistance to modernity. This paper presents a different perspective. Using Fligstein and McAdam's (2011, 2012) theory of strategic action fields, Lamont and Molnár's (2002) sociology of boundaries, and Hallett and Fine's inhabited institutionalism, I argue that Amish parochial schools were a strategic response by challengers to professionalized, compulsory public education as an institutional field. The case in Iowa, where conflicts between Amish communities and state education officials became a flashpoint during the 1950s and 1960s, provides the empirical basis.
The consolidation movement of the 1930s stabilized the education field under the control of professional educators, state certification regimes, and standardized curricula — replacing the local, community-embedded schooling arrangements on which Amish life relied. Amish communities positioned themselves clearly as challengers: resource-poor, institutionally marginal, and poorly served by the prevailing rules of the game. They sought to create alternative organizational forms, small, ungraded, community-managed parochial schools, inhabiting a fundamentally different institutional logic anchored in centuries-old religious commitments, specific bodies of practical knowledge, and particular commitments to communal fidelity.
Creating these schools also represented boundary work in Lamont's sense: organizational displays of the symbolic and social boundaries that set Amish life apart from the wider society. When Iowa officials declared their intent to assimilate the Amish "whether they want to be assimilated or not," they made explicit what expansion in the education field had always implied, that schools were designed to eradicate cultural boundaries, not sustain them. Amish parochial schools stood in organized resistance to that project. The paper draws on Iowa state records, Amish community documents, and contemporary observer accounts to trace how field-level pressures led to community organizational responses.

Author

• Corey J. Colyer, West Virginia University