Train Up a Child - (Young Center Books in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies) Annotated by Karen M Johnson-Weiner (Hardcover)

About the Book

In the most comprehensive study of Old Order schools to date, Johnson-Weiner provides valuable insight into how variables such as community size and relationship with other Old Order groups affect the role of these schools in maintaining behavioral norms and in shaping the Old Order's response to modernity.

Book Synopsis

Train Up a Child explores how private schools in Old Order Amish communities reflect and perpetuate church-community values and identity. Here, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner asserts that the reinforcement of those values among children is imperative to the survival of these communities in the modern world.

Surveying settlements in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, Johnson-Weiner finds that, although Old Order communities have certain similarities in their codes of conduct, there is no standard Old Order school. She examines the choices each community makes--about pedagogy, curriculum, textbooks, even school design--to strengthen religious ideology, preserve the social and linguistic markers of Old Order identity, and protect their own community's beliefs and values from the influence of the dominant society.

In the most comprehensive study of Old Order schools to date, Johnson-Weiner provides valuable insight into how variables such as community size and relationship with other Old Order groups affect the role of these schools in maintaining behavioral norms and in shaping the Old Order's response to modernity.

Review Quotes

Train Up a Child makes a valuable contribution in illustrating how Old Order education, in myriad ways, reflects and conserves the values and commitments of Old Order communities. It makes an equally valuable contribution in what it implicitly says about the current state of secular education.

--Kevin H. Gary "Mennonite Quarterly Review"

Well produced, based on archival and participant-observer research, with a useful bibliography.

--Steven Reschly "Journal of Mennonite Studies"

About the Author

Karen M. Johnson-Weiner is an associate professor of linguistic anthropology and the chair of the Department of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Potsdam.