Wisconsin v. Yoder

7 Key excerpts on "Wisconsin v. Yoder"

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  Cultural Diversity, Liberal Pluralism and Schools

  Isaiah Berlin and Education

  • Neil Burtonwood(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 Political philosophy, cultural diversity and education

  An overview of the Yoder and Mozert cases

  In the previous chapter I drew upon what have been called contrasting faces of liberalism, one with Enlightenment origins that concerns itself with individual autonomy and relies on difference-blind individual rights, and another that is more concerned with the differences between cultural groups and the kinds of accommodations necessary to allow group members to live according to their own, possibly non-liberal, beliefs. In this chapter I will consider both perspectives by examining how liberals of both traditions respond to the widely reported Yoder and Mozert cases in the United States.

  Wisconsin v. Yoder

  The case of Wisconsin v. Yoder1 has been described as the ‘high water mark of judicial accommodationism’ for religious groups in the United States (Macedo, 2000: 153). The Amish of Wisconsin sought exemption from the last two years of compulsory education for their children. They felt that this period of schooling would expose their children to worldly influences and values that were inconsistent with their own teaching and that would interfere with the religious development of the children and therefore compromise the survival of the community. After initial refusal by the Wisconsin education authorities to accommodate the Amish in this way both the Wisconsin Supreme Court (1971) and the United States Supreme Court (1972) found in favour of the Amish and, as Stephen Macedo says, this remains the furthest that any American court has gone in accommodating a religious group seeking exemption from civic requirements perceived by the group as imposing a particular burden on them and their chosen way of life.

  In Yoder the United States Supreme Court was persuaded that the Amish way of life provided children with a decent, satisfying and productive future. The Amish were seen as law-abiding, decent and self-sufficient citizens. The vocational training that Amish children got in the period between ages 14 and 16 was seen as healthy work and very different in kind from the kind of exploitative labour that public education up to the age of 16 was intended to exclude. The court was also persuaded by the sincerity of Amish religious beliefs and the close relationship between religion and the community’s way of life. Referring back to the judgement in the much earlier Pierce case,2 the Yoder

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  Wisconsin and the Shaping of American Law

  • Joseph A. Ranney(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of Wisconsin Press

    (Publisher)

  Wisconsin provided one of the leading examples: in State v. Yoder (1971) Amish parents, whose religious beliefs called for termination of schooling after eighth grade (by which time, they believed, their children would have the skills necessary to lead the simple life that their faith called for), challenged attempts to enforce against them a Wisconsin law requiring attendance to age sixteen. The state’s supreme court held that compulsory education did not constitute a compelling state interest and that the parental right of control, at least in matters implicating religion, was paramount; the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. 48 The school voucher movement has been the most important and most controversial manifestation of expressive individualism in American education law. Voucher systems directly promote educational individualism and represent an implicit (or in the case of supporters such as Justice Ceci, an explicit) rejection of educational assimilationism. Libertarian economist Milton Friedman first proposed vouchers in the 1950s as a way of extending the free market to educa- tion, but it took several decades of rising individualism and frustration with the difficulties of school integration to create the critical mass necessary for vouchers’ political success. 49 That critical mass was first reached in Wisconsin. By the late 1980s, efforts to integrate Milwaukee Public Schools in the wake of Judge Reynolds’s 1976 desegregation decision were widely judged a failure, and anti-assimilation voices were rising within Milwaukee’s black community for the first time.

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  Visions of Schooling

  Conscience, Community, and Common Education

  • Rosemary C. Salomone(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Supreme Court as Schoolmaster 92 gal support to parents who raise values-based objections, religious or otherwise, to the authority of the state in shaping the education of their children. What started out potentially as a ringing endorsement of parental rights and religious tolerance ended up perhaps even giving away some of what Meyer and Pierce had promised. Yoder makes clear that providing public schools is a “paramount re-sponsibility” ranking “at the very apex of the function of a State.” 57 It also makes clear that parental rights, while considered a fundamental liberty interest under Fourteenth Amendment substantive due process, can be outweighed by a state regulation that merely meets the standard of reasonableness unless the claim is tied to the free exercise of religion as defined within the narrow limits of Yoder . Not only were the Court’s standards here more demanding than the Pierce re-quirement that the parents’ choice must be found “unreasonable” and “harm-ful,” but the Court’s crabbed definition of religion excluded most religious claims from Yoder protection. And in the end, the majority warned that courts must act cautiously when addressing even religious claims to accommodation. Justice Burger’s opinion in Yoder continues to generate discussion and debate among scholars. Some hail it as a model of clarity and tolerance while others sharply criticize it for its obtuseness and lack of principled reasoning. Many ex-press ambivalence toward it, agreeing with the ultimate decision but troubled by the narrow rationale supporting it. Equally controversial has been Justice Douglas’s partial dissent, which, along with Justice Byron White’s concurring opinion, raises important matters that prove helpful in thinking through parental dissent and educational purposes.

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  Political Order

  Nomos XXXVIII

  • Ian Shapiro, Russell Hardin, Ian Shapiro, Russell Hardin(Authors)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • NYU Press

    (Publisher)

  We restrict our -selves, rather, t o the specifi c issu e of what the theory of constitu -tional democracy require s when parent s and publi c officials find themselves i n conflic t ove r th e compulsor y educatio n o f chil -dren fo r who m the y hav e overlapping responsibilities . This wa s the issu e presented i n Wisconsin v. Yoder, decided i n 197 2 by th e United State s Suprem e Cour t i n favo r o f Ol d Orde r Amis h parents, wh o wante d t o remov e Amis h childre n fro m th e Wis -consin school s afte r eight h grad e (a t ag e fourteen ) i n violatio n of a statutor y requiremen t o f compulsor y educatio n t o ag e six -teen. 2 Th e court' s decisio n wa s somethin g o f a n outlie r i n American constitutiona l jurisprudence : th e resul t wa s unex -pected, and , althoug h i t ha s neve r bee n overruled , i t ha s no t become a preceden t fo r a genera l expansio n o f th e domai n o f parental authorit y a t th e expens e o f th e publi c la w o f child - Democratic Autonomy and Religious Freedom 367 rearing. Court s (includin g th e Suprem e Court ) hav e tende d t o limit Yoder to its idiosyncratic facts , seeming to avoid opportuni -ties to entrench i t or t o expand it s reach . Yet th e Yoder cas e i s a usefu l vehicl e fo r reasonin g abou t the implication s o f democrati c theor y fo r adult-chil d relation s because o f th e star k an d specifi c manne r i n whic h parenta l an d public authorit y ove r childre n clashed , an d becaus e th e conflic t involved religiou s freedo m a s well as the educatio n o f children . Whatever ou r differin g mora l intuition s about compulsory edu -cation taken on it s own, fe w would seriousl y deny that a substan-tial degree o f religiou s autonomy o f citizen s from th e state is an important valu e i n a moder n democracy .

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  Conscience, Expression, and Privacy

  The Supreme Court in American Society

  • Kermit L. Hall(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Yoder, the 1972 decision permitting Amish children to leave school and cease formal academic education after the eighth grade. 204 Chief Justice Burger’s majority opinion in Yoder can be, and has been, read to limit parental rights over education largely to the Amish. 205 The failure of the Court to apply Meyer and the Free Exercise Clause to other educational settings has led to numerous holdings restricting parental rights, as judges read the Justices’ silence, in combination with dicta in Yoder to indicate that the right in question is narrow and weak. Indeed, the dicta of the last twenty years concerning parental authority over education has been devastating. In Yoder, the Court stated that courts “are ill-equipped to determine the ‘necessity’ of discrete aspects of a State’s program of compulsory education.” 206 In education, as in midwifery, effective judicial review requires that the judiciary carefully examine whether a state’s regulatory scheme truly serves the state’s compelling interests. A statement that the Court generally will defer to the legislature on the question of the “necessity” of a regulation represents the abandonment of judicial review. The Court, as long as abortion has been a fundamental right, has generally not deferred to the legislature’s claim that a certain regulation served compelling state interests. Legislative claims regarding the educational necessity of a regulation are not intrinsically less susceptible to judicial review than legislative claims regarding the medical necessity of regulation. The Court’s denigration of its role in evaluating the fit of regulatory means and ends has been matched by denigration of the right itself. The majority has stated that Pierce lends “no support to the contention that parents may replace state educational requirements with their own idiosyncratic views of what knowledge a child needs to be a productive and happy member of society. . .

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  Constitutional Debates on Freedom of Religion

  A Documentary History

  • Gerald Long, John J. Patrick(Authors)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  The Court’s analysis assumes that the only interests at stake in the case are those of the Amish parents on the one hand, and those of the State on the other. The difficulty with this ap- proach is that, despite the Court’s claim, the parents are seeking to vin- dicate not only their own free exercise claims, but also those of their high-school-age children. . . . On this important and vital matter of education, I think the children should be entitled to be heard. While the parents, absent dissent, nor- mally speak for the entire family, the education of the child is a matter on which the child will often have decided views. He may want to be a pianist or an astronaut or an oceanographer. To do so he will have to break from the Amish tradition. It is the future of the student, not the future of the parents, that is imperiled by today’s decision. If a parent keeps his child out of school beyond the grade school, then the child will be forever barred from entry into the new and amazing world of diversity that we have today. The child may decide that that is the preferred course, or he may rebel. It is the student’s judgment, not his parents’, that is essential if we are to give full meaning to what we have said about the Bill of Rights and of the right of students to be masters of their own destiny. If he is harnessed to the Amish way of life by those in authority over him and if his edu- cation is truncated, his entire life may be stunted and deformed. The child, therefore, should be given an opportunity to be heard before the State gives the exemption which we honor today. . . . Source: Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972). DOCUMENT 42: Heffron v. International Society for Krishna Consciousness (1981) The state of Minnesota enforced a regulation, known as Rule 6.05, that required any person or group intending to sell or distribute merchan- dise, including printed material, at the annual state fair to do so from a fixed booth.

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  Encyclopedia of Religion in American Politics

  • Jeffrey Schultz, John G. West, Iain Maclean, Jeffrey Schultz, John G. West, Iain Maclean(Authors)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  As a result of this ruling, the burden of proof shifted to the government to demonstrate that strong interests exist, and how religious conduct harms those interests. Sher- bert served much like the Court's equal protection jurisprudence to heighten scrutiny and to establish a two-tiered approach to examining legislation. Just as with racially based legislation, where the government cannot simply provide a rational basis for a law (but must show a compelling reason if the legislation is to pass constitutional muster), the Court held that the government must have an overriding reason to re- strict religious liberties. In the Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) decision, the Court ruled that a law compelling children to attend school until 16 years of age severely threatened the survival ofthe Amish faith. In Yoder, the Court reaffirmed the elements of its decision in Sherbert. Moreover, it reinforced the Free Exercise Clause by adding that the state must show a compelling reason to limit state conduct and demonstrate that a less drastic means is available to reach its goal. Thus Yoder gave rise to the "least drastic means" component of the bal- ancing test. But since Sherbert and Yoder, the Court has had, at best, a mixed record on free exercise claims. Cases such as United States v. Lee (1982), Boh Jones University v. United States (1983), Goldman v. Weinberger (1986), and Lyng v. North- west Indian Cemetery Protective Association (1989) seriously eroded the Sherbert-Yoder doctrine. Finally, in 1990, the Court reaffirmed its commitment to the Reynolds caveat. In the 5-4 decision in EmploymentDivision of Oregon v. Smith (1990), the Court reversed a verdict by the Oregon Supreme Court to allow unemployment compensation for two men, members ofthe Native American Church, fired for ingesting sacramen- tal peyote in violation ofthe state's controlled substance law. The Oregon Court applied Sherbert and held that the men were entitled to unemployment compensation benefits.

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