'Train a child in the way he should go...'
By: Rebecca Mabry
Thursday, January 10, 2008
The bell in the belfry over the front door of Meadowlark School rings. It's 8:15 on a clear, sunny October morning. Twenty or so Amish children, playing ball in a big, grassy lot behind the school, come running. The children have already put their ponies in the schoolyard barn and parked the pony carts in a neat row outside. Some children have trekked alongside the country roads to get there. Some days, a few even rollerblade on the oil-chip roads.
Meadowlark School is one of 17 Amish parochial schools in the Arthur community. With its white siding and bell tower, it looks true to Amish tradition – quaint, practical and simple. It has one large classroom for the 24 students and an outer room that is about the size of a double-car garage. The outer room is where the children can have recess when the weather's bad. It's lined with cubbies for the jackets, the girls' black bonnets, the boys' straw hats and their lunch totes.
Teacher Marilyn Schrock has been teaching Amish children for 13 years. And like at all Amish parochial schools, the students call her by her first name. This year she has no eighth-graders, and there are three times as many boys, 18, as girls, 6. Marilyn has hung pictures of apples in bushel baskets on which she's written the names of each student and the names of their mothers and fathers. There are 11 bushel baskets this year. All the children come from two-parent traditional homes, and all live nearby. They come from three neighboring church districts, and many are first- or second-cousins. Six of them are Marilyn's nieces and nephews. Because they are a tight community of neighbors and family, when there's an Amish wedding in the neighborhood (always on weekdays, not weekends), the school will close so the children can attend.
The children waste no time filing into the schoolhouse. They toss their ball gloves into their cubbies and enter the classroom without talking to take their seats at their desks.
Their entry is orderly, and quiet soon fills the room. Marilyn gives a nod, and a student leads the children, again single file, hymnbooks in hand, to the outer room. There they form three rows, the tallest children to the back.
They sing three hymns. The children take turns picking the hymns and that morning one of the young boys selected the recognizable "How Great Thou Art." Marilyn's clear soprano voice leads the children through the songs without benefit of a piano. They sing in English. Though Amish children speak Pennsylvania Dutch in their homes, the Amish leaders want the children to know and be comfortable with English. So school lessons are in English and children speak English even on the playground.
After the sing, Marilyn announces Marlin is turning 7 today. They sing the traditional "Happy Birthday" with a second verse that asks God for special blessings for Marlin that day. The children return single file to the classroom and stand by their desks. A child leads them in The Lord's Prayer, and they take their seats once more.
"How many disciples did Jesus have?" Marilyn asks.
A few raise their hands high. The one she calls on gets it correct – Jesus sent 70 other disciples out into the world. Marilyn reads a story about the disciples.
Five rows of students' desks crisscross the gleaming wood floors of the classroom. The ages of the children descend across the room from the oldest on the left to the youngest on the right.
With no electricity, the east and west walls are banked with windows, and the curtains – simple pastel blue cotton panels – are pulled back with a tie to let in the light. A handmade sign on the wall says "Praise the Lord for his goodness." Another says, "A good example has twice the value of good advice." Another quotes the Golden Rule.
Marilyn, 44, is wearing the traditional Amish collarless dress, this one in a polyester and Wedgwood blue. She wears black stockings and dark tennis shoes. The thin, white ribbons of her white head covering are tied loosely.
The Amish schoolgirls also wear white or black head coverings, their hair pulled back into buns at the nape of their necks. Their mothers make the caps of sheer organdy and treat them with starch to make them hold their pleats and shape. They wear their "coverings," as they're called, all day. The colors of the girls' homemade dresses are muted and dark, like a dusty plum or dark teal. They wear black stockings and dark tennis or tie-up shoes. The boys wear collared shirts in pastel shades of yellow, blue and green. Most are homemade. The boys have dark suspenders attached to the polyester-cotton blend denim pants made by their mothers. After she's finished reading the book about Jesus' disciples, Marilyn sets a kitchen timer for 5 minutes.
"Does anyone have any news to share?" she asks.
One girl tells about a man knocking on their door late at night, scaring them at first. But he stopped to tell them their cow was out on the road.
"OH! Was it your cow?" Marilyn asks.
"No, the neighbor's," the girl sighed.
A young boy said he heard a car hit a buggy in Arthur the day before. Marilyn asks if anyone knows anything about it. One of the older boys reports that he heard the buggy was ruined, but the driver was OK and he walked the horse home. He's not sure whose buggy it was; several children enthusiastically nod in agreement to Marilyn's reflection that no one was seriously hurt.
At 8:45, they turn their attention to Psalm 56, verses 4 and 5. The older children write in a notebook they keep especially for the Bible passages. The younger children copy a shorter, simpler verse.
Once finished, Marilyn or her teaching assistant, Lori Otto, check the students' spelling and grammar.
As they start their schoolwork, Marilyn and Lori move between grade levels. The first-graders are learning words that start with B. Older students work at a table on math with Lori. Another group of middle grade children study time zones. "If it's 5 p.m. in Hawaii, what time is it in St. John's Newfoundland?" Sunlight pours into the room through the east windows, but on gloomy days there are two propane ceiling lights. There is also a propane floor lamp if needed.
When the clock on the wall registers 9:45, Marilyn taps a bell and the students put away their work. She reads the names of a couple of students and they leave for recess first. They are the batters.
At recess, a few of the youngest girls head for the swings and teeter-totter, but most of the children play a game where a batter hits balls to the fielders; once a fielder has caught three, the fielder becomes the batter.
The 15-minute recess ends with Marilyn ringing a hand-held school bell. Students stop to get a drink of water, and a few of the boys remove their shoes and socks and enter the classroom in bare feet; it's getting warmer.
First order of business after recess is the recitation one more time of Psalm 56, verses 4 and 5.
"In God I will praise his word, in God I have put my trust; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me. Every day they wrest my words; all their thoughts are against me for evil."
The youngest children have a simple line from Psalm 119 to recite: "The entrance of his word giveth light."
It's also worth pointing out that the school visit took place one week to the day after the tragic murder of five young Amish girls in the country schoolhouse at Nickel Mines, Pa., on Oct. 2, 2006.
The timing was not of my choosing – I'd talked to Marilyn about spending a day in her school before the shootings. I would have understood if she had decided to back out. But Marilyn graciously let her invitation stand and I – an "English" lady in a pickup truck with a notebook and a ballpoint pen – sat at the back of the classroom taking copious notes, smiling a lot.
I wanted to assure the children that though I was a stranger, I was harmless. Some of the littlest ones looked at me with wide eyes, and I hoped it was not because their view of the outside world had changed in a week's time. Neither Marilyn nor the children mentioned the shootings, but the Bible verses the children studied that day addressed fear.
"What time I am afraid I will trust in thee. In God I will praise his work. In God I have put my trust. I will not fear what flesh can do unto me."
Marilyn said weeks later that she did indeed select Bible verses after the shooting to assure the children. A month later, the verse they were learning was from Matthew 6 – about forgiveness.
The day after the shooting in Pennsylvania, one of the Amish bishops visited the school to talk with them. Of course, the children were upset, and after Marilyn and the children talked about it she decided they needed to move on.
"I said, 'If we keep talking about this it's going to be harder for us to trust, and it'll reopen our fears. You can discuss it at home, but let's try not to talk about it much here.'"
She said she tries not to think about the shooting or let it affect how she conducts school. There have been no changes made.
"You know, if someone wanted to, they could drive by and shoot everyone while we're outside playing. So (worrying) doesn't do any good," Marilyn said. "I like to trust people, I guess." She sighs. "I just don't know."
I told her of the hundreds of editorials written around the country saying that the Amish taught us all a lesson about forgiveness and true Christianity when the Amish at Nickel Mines visited the killer's widow and children. Some of the victims' parents even attended the killer's funeral.
"That's the way we were taught," she said. "And to us, if we don't forgive we aren't true to our faith."
Marilyn, a profoundly devout Amish lady raised in the home of one of the community's senior ministers, hopes she could be as forgiving.
"I guess I wonder if my faith would be strong enough that I could do what they're doing out there," she said.
She knows some people have questioned why God would let that tragedy happen. Marilyn doesn't know if he did or not, but she is sure that if God did let that happen, those five little girls are with him now.
"And they are not living in fear with him," she said. "They are not in fear now."
Note: In the summer of 2007, the fathers of Meadowlark School raised the roof and added a second story to the school. Growing numbers of children for fall 2007 prompted the expansion to a two-room school.