We happened to catch a few segments of this.

It was PITIFUL. The kids have frightfully little education. Many of them talk like hillbillies (when they speak English rather than Pennsylvania Dutch/Deutsch). I remember one boy saying, "I wish I'd of paid more attention in school. I cain't read too good."

One of the girls - a very pretty one - smuggled in magazines from the "outside" world and hid them carefully at the bottom of a drawer in her room. When she had the chance to be alone, she would flip through the magazines and sigh at the glamor of being a model.

Both of these kids - and a few others that were interviewed - wanted to leave the Amish community and go to New York. NEW YORK, of all places! A city like that would eat those kids alive and spit out the bits of gristle within a matter of hours!

And I thought of that, with the recent kidnaping (and fortunate return) of two young Amish girls by a couple in upstate New York.

What on earth would these incredibly naive kids DO in New York? They are totally lacking in education, job skills, any kind of worldly sophistication - how could they be anything but junk food for predators?

I could certainly understand their desire to get away, but in doing so, they were irrevocably cutting any possibility of going home again, (I kept thinking of Robert Frost's poem: "Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in." Not if you are Amish, I guess) so they have no safety net, no fallback.

The whole thing struck me as incredibly tragic.

And handicapping these kids with such a minimal education and limited job skills struck me as nothing short of abuse. Of course, I understand the rationale: You don't NEED further education for life in the 19th century. But it isn't right for everyone.

I admire the Amish who are contented with their lifestyle and are able to stick with it, and be happy. But it looks like there is a stern and dark underside to it. Harsh and unforgiving. Kind of like another religion or two that I've heard of.

I loved that show until I found out it was pretty fake and staged. If you do an internet search you'll read about the controversies surrounding that show.

I used to live very close to Amish country. In the fall you can drive through the area, and it is so picturesque. The horse drawn plows, pumpkin fields, and the whole theme of harvest hangs thick in the air. The amish shops are laden with fall harvest baked goods and quilts. It makes one yearn for the simple life.

The flip side isn't so pretty. Child labor, ignorance, living in filth, and working from sun up til sun down. The bright white houses with no electricity, and a buggy out front may make you feel a bit nostalgic. Don't be fooled. It's a hard life. Not just for some, but for anyone that's born into it. There are no choices, no options. The outside is a terrifying place.

It was interesting to me. When I was in rural Utah, or rural Penn.I saw the same fearful look in the locals eyes when a stranger walked in. Fear is the emotion of the day. It's what keeps them in their religious, uneducated prison. When I saw it in the eyes of small children and teens, it broke my heart. Those sweet kids are prisoners before they're born. There's nothing wonderful or beautiful about the life they're assigned to. They have no say, no choice. Unless they are extremely lucky, they have no choices, and no way out.

I protest about the filth remark. they have very clean households inside and out. The ones I have known are not the backward ones people are complaining about. i think they are more normal in many ways than Mormons and are certainly more easy to be around. they're insulated but I don't think that they are insulated int he same way that mormons are. mormons are jerks.

Spot on!

draft animals, farm animals, horses for buggies...

then yes, it's akin to living at the turn of the 20th Century before the clean horseless carriage took over the country.

and the streets became clean overnight and there was no longer the need for street cleaners.

because....wait for it,

people were no longer living surrounded by horseshit.

the Amish are covered in horseshit, step in horseshit, breathe and wear horseshit.

this is what the original poster meant when "living in filth" she meant living in horseshit.

Having spent weeks at a time living with Amish relatives, I feel very comfortable calling you ignorant and uninformed on the matter. Take your venom elsewhere.

This movie is out on Netflix - Sad and similar to the Mormon experience of leaving.

What is it like to be cut off from your faith and your family? The Amish: Shunned follows seven people who have chosen to leave their closed and tightly-knit communities for the outside world, knowing they can never return. Each has paid deeply for their decision. Estranged from loved ones, these former Amish find themselves struggling to make their way in modern America.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/shunned/

I have an interesting perspective on this one. As was mentioned elsewhere, the Amish differ greatly from sect to sect. My grandmother was born Amish, became evangelical and then Mormon. I still have quite a bit of family who are Amish. The sect they live in is very loving and accepting of family that leaves, they are very well educated and truthfully are some of the nicest people I've ever met. It is definitely a hard life and not for everyone. But as far as the evils portrayed by that show, that has not been my family's experience even having left their flock.

I don't have any first hand knowledge, but what I have read reflects what you wrote. That people who leave are not shunned, but welcome back at any time. In a way, they do get a choice. Rumspringa (sp?) is a period of time where the young ones can experience the outside world and decide to remain Amish or not. Probably, though, just like Mormonism, there is a flip side that non members don't see.

I'm sure it varies by locale and family. It's probably somewhat similar to Mormonism. Some families shun those who leave, others love and treat them just the same (like mine). You're sort of given a choice, but not really (they like to throw "free agency" around, but they don't really mean it). As I said, there is a dark side to the happy shiny faces you see - lots of guilting and fear based tactics and lies.

I have similar experience. i have a friend who was raised Amish and now has a music store in Indiana. He left the belief after that period the Amish give their kids to try the world on for size and he didn't report any kind of ill feelings in the family. When I lived in Amish country i went to an Amish run drivein restaurant and was frequently waited on by a beautiful 16 or 17 year old Amish girl with braces. not all Amish can find land to farm so they have business and in the business they can use computers and phones and stuff. In one town I know a family has a huge hardware and clothing store, and yes before you ask, their name is Yoder (it ssometimes seems that half of them are named yoder). many become volunteer fire fighters and can drive. At the same time most hitchhike. I've picked up several Amish because they had large shopping bags of food and if I was going their way I'd drop them off. I never found them all that weird other than the religion portion of it. i've seen many go to jail for too much use of fertilizer and polluting the water runoff.

There are different sects of the Anabaptist faith that the Amish follow. There are the Old Order - the ones who shun all modern conveniences and live as they did in the 17th century in Germany.

There is another group (not sure of their name) who follow the tenets of the faith but have electricity in the home and drive cars. TV's and electronics are a no-no.

There are the Mennonites, who are very prevalent in my area of SE PA. Think of them as Amish-light. Some dress similarly to the Amish but don't shun modern conveniences. Some are fully modern. The Mennonites, like the Amish, are pacifists and do a lot of service-oriented missionary work. My dentist belongs to a Mennonite church and has gone on service trips through the denomination to do dentistry in poor countries.

If you've ever seen a Ten Thousand Villages shop, that is a non-profit affiliated with the Mennonites. It sells fair trade crafts from artisans around the world.

The way Appalachians speak is a dialect, not just some ignorant misuse of standard English. The dialect has been documented and studied like any other. Appalachians are also an ethnic group, not "white trash" that you are justified in ridiculing.

BTW, you speak a dialect, too. If it's closer to the standard Midwest dialect used on television, you may not be aware of that, but you are in fact speaking a variant of standard English.

I am appalled that someone on this board would use that term to stigmatize people. After dealing with the bigotry and provincialism of Mormon culture, I would think most people at RFM would know better.

Thanks for bringing this up! I do a lot of Appalachian music, and the Hillbillies I have hung around with--actual West Virginians, no less--have master's degrees and PhDs. The luthier who made my instrument lives way out in the woods near Shepherdstown and is both educated and progressive. But do they talk that way? Yeah, most of them. Are they hillbillies? They call themselves that with quite a bit of pride.

I've been to some Amish farms and met many of them. They have absolutely the worst dental care. The dentist only has pliars. If you have an aching tooth, it gets pulled. On the Breaking Amish show, they had a girl in her 20s who had all false teeth. Unfortunately that is too common. I met a young girl about 17 who was about to get married. She was a very lovely girl but wore dentures - at 17!

That might be common, but what I've read the girl was in a car accident and lost her teeth that way. There were photos of her with her real teeth after she left the faith.