The Amish kinda slap, they didn't invent addictive social media, put a game show host in charge of nuclear weapons, or have a bunch of corporations change their icons to rainbow icons while still being shitty.
They literally realized 300 years ago that they should opt out of the nonsense America descended into
I know that's meant to be funny, but the Amish community is a nightmare, from the outside looking in, very closely. I live in an area where there is a large Amish community; they outnumber "English" about 4:1.
Patriarchy in all decisions. The old men make choices for families based on what they know is best, and you follow that rule, regardless of your own views. Women are not allowed a voice in formal decisions. Children are a tradable commodity. If you upset an elder, your life is over.
You're raised speaking German first, so that you can "learn your heritage" (read: always feel the divide between yourself and the rest of the country). You get up to an 8th grade education and nothing more. Only if it doesn't interfere with your chores. If you are sent off to college for whatever reason (my neighbor was a college educated Amish; he was the legal representative for the community) they treat you like an outsider. You are not allowed a voice in community votes, if they have them. You get the scraps. If you start a business, and someone else wants to start the same thing, you give it over to them, no questions asked.
God forbid you disagree with the elders. Imagine being in your 30's, with just an 8th grade education, and your entire community, family, and support system turns their back on you and yours. You're screwed.
If the bishop believes another community could use your skills, or doesn't like your family, you have to move, possibly hundreds of miles. That's after selling everything you own, usually at a loss. But that doesn't matter, because the community itself and the church actually own everything, you are just renting your own business and/or home from the church.
Absolute rule by the male elders. Lies and buried secrets. That's the way of the Amish. But they get a pass, because their beards and hats look funny.
Some of this varies by the exact community and sect. But there are some good lessons in there too. Health-wise they are great, with some of the lowest costs, low chronic disease, and getting about double the recommended 10k steps per day.
So we don't want to emulate them in every way, but we can take some lessons in certain areas.
If you truly want resilient kids, that lifestyle will do it. Safety is another thing though. I saw a 1 year old just fall 3 feet off a playset and it only cried a little. The parents weren't very concerned. I guess when you have 6 kids, it's like you have "spares". Not that it's the right way to look at it, but ignoring balance of other concerns they will be tough.
> The parents weren't very concerned. I guess when you have 6 kids, it's like you have "spares".
As a parent of 4, having multiple children does tend to put things in perspective, but really what makes the biggest difference is probably that you can't physically helicopter all of them. So you have to give up that mindset. Not that you don't still need to keep an eye on them.
The western model is built on patriarchy, they just continually import people from patriarchies to supply western work forces. Without patriarchy the western model would collapse because westerners aren't interested in creating a non-patriarchal model of society which might reduce their standards of living and force them to expend labour on things like childrearing.
It's an out of sight, out of mind patriarchy. The amish are so offensive partially because they genuinely are extreme, but also in part because they're self-sustaining so they can't hide and abstract away such cruelty. In any case, there's perhaps a middle path between the extremes of amish society and "Patriarchy for the poor" western society.
>The western model is built on patriarchy, they just continually import people from patriarchies to supply western work forces. Without patriarchy the western model would collapse because westerners aren't interested in creating a non-patriarchal model of society which might reduce their standards of living and force them to expend labour on things like childrearing.
I'd advise that you try to find a new term to replace "western" here.
There have been plenty of experiments within a "western" context to do things differently, but few of them have spread broadly. In addition, there are plenty of long-lived patriarchies outside whatever you might consider "the west" to be.
> you're raised speaking German first, so that you can "learn your heritage" (read: always feel the divide between yourself and the rest of the country).
This isn't a fair take IMO. The Amish are not the only groups of Pennsylvania Dutch that are native German speakers, and many of these groups are not counter culture isolationists like the Amish are. The Moravians for example were banned from the colony of New York because they went there to represent the Mohicans when the New York colony tried to illegally rob them of the lands they'd been promised in treaties. Like many of the non-anabaptist (that's Amish & Mennonite sects) groups of Pennsylvania Dutch they were fully on board with participating in broader US culture as long as they could do so while speaking German and engaged in all the same businesses, government/legal/military roles that the rest of society did.
People just think of the Amish by default in these conversations because in part they're more visible, and in part because the non-isolationist groups scaled back the German speaking in the wake of the two world wars.
> Patriarchy in all decisions
In the non-anabaptist communities this is not like that anymore than it is for broader culture. Traditional medicine practitioners in the Pennsylvania Dutch- for example the pow-wowers, were socially expected to only train an apprentice/protégé who is of the opposite sex, and further socially expected to provide their services for free. To stray from either of those was (and still is) a major taboo.
>Patriarchy in all decisions. The old men make choices for families based on what they know is best
Is this not a thing where you are? Americans(and I am one) speak much about patriarchy but still uphold it strongly. Even countries like Indonesia and Pakistan have already elected female leaders. I see people say things like this, and yet many American women would still call it a patriarchy in every sense.
>Children are a tradable commodity.
? That's kind of a huge accusation and I'm not sure what it means. That could also be describing surrogacy which is widely accepted in our society.
>If you upset an elder, your life is over.
This is true in a lot of places-- including the US senate-- and is often the result of power concentrating in the hands of those with the most tenure. While they may lean on this more in their culture, it's still not exactly unrecognizable behavior.
>You're raised speaking German first, so that you can "learn your heritage"
There are immigrants(and most European countries) that do that. It's hard to teach a second language once a child is speaking English with their peers. If you teach the non-english language first, it's easy for them to learn English as a second language in school where they'll pick it up naturally speaking with peers.
> If you are sent off to college for whatever reason (my neighbor was a college educated Amish; he was the legal representative for the community) they treat you like an outsider.
Sounds difficult. I won't deny there I'm sure there are peculiarities about their culture worth disagreeing with.
>Imagine being in your 30's, with just an 8th grade education, and your entire community, family, and support system turns their back on you and yours.
Doesn't this happen to trans youth all the time? Minus the education thing.
>But they get a pass, because their beards and hats look funny.
That's not why they're not discussed more often. It's because they mostly stick to themselves so people don't bother looking into their communities. This can happen with highly insular communities, it's not an excuse but it is what it is.
Sounds awful, and yet 30% of Amish girls don't want to kill themselves. So we can go off on the Amish, provided when we finish we admit we do an even worse job of protecting our daughters' wellbeing. And the Amish are a politically and culturally irrelevant minority, who exist in the general consciousness primarily as a punch line, which makes me wonder if we couldn't come up with a more constructive way of avoiding the issue.
Fair enough, although it seems unlikely, being such an extraordinary number. Perhaps we could at least agree that the increase due to excessive social media use among the Amish is likely much lower (as it is in those in the general public who do not partake?).
In any case, the Amish are not a serious social comparison, they are a curiosity, and nothing we can say or speculate about their failings will make ours any less. Does China have this problem? Did the US have it 20 years ago? [SPOILER: no] Is turning our children over to exploitative corporations and addictive algorithms likely to result in good outcomes? Do we have any data about this?
> You get up to an 8th grade education and nothing more...Imagine being in your 30's, with just an 8th grade education
This at least would be a massive improvement for most people in the US who only read at a 6th grade level and have a comparable level of skill in math and science.
You're assuming that the average Amish are great at school, which based on nost communities around the world, is most likely false.
I.e. the average highschool graduate probably reads at 6th grade level but the average middle school graduate probably only reads at 5th or 4th grade level is a reasonable assumption.
You're right, it assumes that teaching to an 8th grade level means they've learned to read/write at an 8th grade level.
There's also an assumption that the Amish are more rigorousness in their teaching and that they would make sure kids learn to read at the level expected from them which may or may not actually be true.
Although a few minutes with Google didn't give me a lot of firm numbers, it did return results which suggest that the Amish may be more concerned with making sure their students are literate and that they care very much about ensuring their children are well educated as a matter of cultural identity. I didn't see anything to support the idea that they would perform worse than non-amish children at least. It also mentions that they're nearly all fluent in two languages which is a bonus.
> Yet illiteracy is virtually nonexistent in Amish settlements. Without television and computers, they read more than most Americans. They have a remarkable ability to learn new skills—even complicated ones—and value lifelong learning. Amish parents are heavily involved in their children’s education: they donate the land and building supplies for the school, visit regularly, attend school events, and take turns caring for the facilities.
> In the book Amish Society, John Hostetler wrote, “On several standardized tests, Amish children performed significantly higher in spelling, word usage, and arithmetic than a sample of pupils in rural public schools. They scored slightly above the national norm in these subjects in spite of small libraries, limited equipment, the absence of radio and television, and teachers who lacked college training.” (https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blo...)
> That is one thing that sets our culture apart from the Amish. The Amish grow up writing. And yes, I grew up writing too but in the Amish culture reading is one of the biggest things in their culture. And even as adults such as Eli and Anna in the article; they participate in circle letters with people that have the same background, interests, or anything else that the have in common.(https://edblogs.olemiss.edu/jmswartz/2020/09/04/literacy-and...)
> On several standardized tests, Amish children performed significantly higher in spelling, word usage, and arithmetic than a sample of pupils in rural public schools.
I was watching this show on African-American troops during WWI and The Powers That Be were really[0] concerned that the ones from the cities were consistently performing better on the standardized tests than the rural white folks.
Think the rural schools aren’t the best at educating the youths.
[0] They were also concerned about the French treating them like real people too so, yeah…
Some of them have opted out of nonsense like reporting sexual assault to authorities, as well.
From "Child Sexual Abuse in the Amish Community: A Hidden Epidemic":
> “I’ve learned that sexual abuse in their communities is an open secret, spanning generations,” she wrote in the 2019 article. “Victims told me stories of inappropriate touching, groping, fondling, exposure to genitals, digital penetration, coerced oral sex, anal sex and rape—all at the hands of their own family members, neighbors and church leaders.”
lol, the Amish are not competitive on the world stage and if left to run the country, we'd have actually been invaded a dozen times already - or at the least, we'd be a vassal state.
opting out of "the nonsense" is fun to think about, but not when competing countries have robotic factories.
The ridiculous Amish model of being conservative with new technology and considering as a community if it has benefit to the society before introducing it?
Inconceivable. If a new technology comes out, we need to adopt it in 0.1 seconds, or we'll be Stone Age caveman losers!
