When Free Exercise Meets Compulsory Education In Wisconsin v. Yoder

A tiny truancy fine opened a constitutional door that still shapes classrooms today. We unpack Wisconsin v. Yoder, the 1972 Supreme Court case where Old Order Amish parents won a free exercise exemption from compulsory high school, and explore how that ruling moved from a narrow carve-out to a live wire in public education. Along the way, we surface the question Justice Douglas couldn’t let go: when parental faith guides a child’s schooling, what room is left for the child’s own future?

We start with the facts on the ground: Amish families who embraced eighth grade but resisted two more years they believed would erode their religious community. The Court’s opinion praised a law-abiding, self-sufficient tradition and concluded Wisconsin lacked a compelling reason to force attendance to sixteen. That framing elevated parental religious liberty while leaving students’ independent interests largely unaddressed, assuming the teenagers’ preferences matched their parents and that practical training would suffice for adult choices beyond the community.

Then the ground shifts. For years, lower courts treated Yoder as an outlier. Now, with Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Supreme Court reads Yoder as a broad principle: parents may seek relief when school content threatens their religious teaching. That move transforms Yoder from a rural attendance dispute into a modern template for curricular opt-outs, from LGBTQ-inclusive storybooks to other contested topics. We examine what this means for teachers, administrators, and families trying to keep classrooms coherent and inclusive while respecting sincere faith claims. Can schools offer meaningful alternatives without hollowing out core learning? How do we prevent opt-outs from stigmatizing students or shrinking the civic curriculum?

We close by mapping a path forward. Evidence-based pedagogy, transparent communication, and narrowly tailored accommodations can honor religious liberty while protecting student learning and dignity. The hard part is the child-centered question at the heart of this story: safeguarding a young person’s horizon of choice. If this conversation helps you see the stakes—and the nuances—more clearly, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review with your take on where the line should be drawn.

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Chapters

• 2:47 Setting The Yoder Stage
• 4:03 Amish Life And Schooling Clash
• 7:08 The Supreme Court’s Exemption Logic
• 8:46 Parents’ Rights Versus Children’s Interests
• 11:57 From Outlier To Precedent
• 13:01 The Mahmoud Case Reframes Yoder
• 14:36 Implications For Public Schools Today

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 2:01

Today we're talking about the free exercise law, and this was always a case that my students love to get into because then that's well, why do I have to go to school until I'm 16? So, Professor Kensky, we're looking at Wisconsin versus Yoder from 1972. What this case is free exercise. Can you tell me a little bit more about it?

SPEAKER_00: 2:23

Absolutely. So Yoder, Yoder is a really interesting case. Until recently, it wasn't actually a terribly important case in our constitutional jurisprudence, and that's just changed, which maybe we'll get into. But here's what was going on. Wisconsin required parents to send their kids to school through the age of 16. That's really common. As far as I know, every state has a similar requirement. It's not always 16 exactly, but this but the same idea. So Wisconsin had this requirement, and and the way that truancy laws work, if you don't send your kids to school, then it is actually a crime for the parents. Now it's a crime punishable by a$5 fine, I should say, which I'm going to get back to in a minute as well. In county, a very rural county in Wisconsin, there's a community of old order Amish. The uh people of the Amish faith tend to live for religious reasons the way that a lot of people lived two and three and four hundred years ago. It's an agrarian society, they're they're farmers, they they don't they don't adopt modern technology, they they shun a lot of what we think of as modern society. And so they they sent their kids to school, they sent their kids to the the public schools through the age through age about age 14, through the end of eighth grade. Wisconsin requiring through age 16 is about two more years of school, give or take for most kids. These three sets of parents, or three, I think it was three dads of old or Amish kids sued over not wanting to send their children to those last one or two years of school. They wanted to have their kids stop at the eighth grade. And then they said, in our community, um we instead have, they called it informal education, but they said what we have is we have the kids work with their parents. So the as this as the Supreme Court put it in explaining things, the Amish wanted the boys to learn to be farmers and the girls to learn to be housewives. And so the idea was that instead of those two years of school, they would go back and work on the farm. The the people who challenged the Wisconsin law in the case argued that making me send my kids to those two years of high school uh interferes with our free exercise of religion in basically in two ways. They said, number one, although two related ways. They said, number one, kids in high school are experiencing worldly influences that will draw them away from God, from the church, from our beliefs. And number two was that was that as part of our Amish culture, religious culture, you need to be a part of and in this community, not dealing with or turn to outsiders. And so that uh that informal education of learning to be farmers and housewives instead of learning um higher math or you know, more complicated English or things like that, is getting in the way of our religious education. So they challenged the the imposition of what was a$5 criminal penalty. Uh the families were each buying$5, which by the way, I looked it up, is about$38.75 today. So that's what the case was about, was just under$39. Uh, and the and the Amish were arguing that their way of life, the Amish religion and the Amish way of life, is threatened by those requirements for those two extra years of school. The Supreme Court, in a decision by then Chief Justice Warren Berger, held that that, yes, the Amish have a free exercise right to opt their kids out of those last two years of school. And the court came to that decision in kind of an interesting way. It spent a lot of time talking about the Amish, the history of the Amish, who the Amish are. And they described this rural agrarian traditional community where the court said there's no record of any crime by any Amish people in Green County, Wisconsin, and there's and there's no taking of there's no need for public support, and there's none of those sorts of things. These are this is a responsible, closed community doing its own thing, and doing its own thing in the way that, although the court didn't say exactly this, was basically grandma and grandpa used to do. And so, and so this is a special case, a special situation where the threat to the Amish religion and the threat to the these kids being drawn away from their faith, but mostly to the community, the preservation of the of the community over time was significant enough that the parents, not the kids, but the parents' free exercise of religion was in danger because of that requirement of two extra years of school. And the state of Wisconsin didn't have a good enough reason for requiring those two years of school to enforce the law. So the parents are entitled to an exemption from the law.

SPEAKER_01: 8:00

How should we understand that tension then between parental religious liberty and individual rights or interests of the children involved?

SPEAKER_00: 8:09

I think this is one of the most interesting questions, and it's one that's beginning to come up in cases today, following on the sort of the first times that yodor is actually being used in cases today, because the court essentially had an assumption that was they treated the kids' interests as either the same as the parents' interests or not important because it was the parents' religious freedom. And one thing that uh Justice Douglas, writing in dissent, had to say in Wisconsin against Yoder was what about the kids who want to go to high school, want a higher education? What about the ones who don't want to, maybe don't want to stay in the Amish community? They want to have additional life choices, but in addition to being farmers and being housewives, what if they want to be nuclear physicists? How are they going to do that if they can't get an education? The court's view was, uh the majority's view was this is a perfectly understandable traditional way of life, and the parents are entitled to protect protect it because it's a religious way of life. The court said along the way, if it weren't religious, none of this would matter. There wouldn't be a right here, or at least probably not. But because it but because the way of life is rooted in religious beliefs, the parents get to impose that. And so it really set up this deep tension between between the kids and the parents. And the court said, well, we don't have any, we don't have any evidence that that the kids here, the the eighth graders, didn't want to didn't want to be part of their family's religion, so no problem. What Justice Douglas said in his dissent was actually there was a lot of evidence in the trial court that about 30% of the of the children in the Amish community grow up and leave the community. They're going to go off in other, in other, in other spheres of life. And what about them? And what about their ability to make choices and have those and have those choices? The majority basically said something pretty close to, we don't care about that. We think that the training that they get in being self-sufficient is great and will serve them well, and and we don't think that these children want to leave anyway. So it was it was a funny thing where the respect for the Amish religion and the Amish culture as a matter of freedom of religion just didn't penetrate to the rights of the students. And that's a and that's a tension that we face today.

SPEAKER_01: 10:55

So Yoder's legacy has evolved as the court has shifted its approach to religious exemptions. How has the case influenced later free exercise jurisprudence? And does that reasoning still hold in today's legal landscape?

SPEAKER_00: 11:11

So until last summer, we're doing this in December 2025, until the summer of 2025, the answer was it really hadn't made any difference. It was an outlier. The court said along the way, the majority in Yoder said, we looked at the Amish. The Amish are a special case. We're not sure that any other religious group can actually make the showing that they did about the threat to their religious community, and that they're all good law-abiding citizens who aren't on the public dole, as the English would say, aren't getting government, uh taking government benefits. It's not costing the rest of us anything, so they should be able to do their thing. The court basically said, we don't we don't know that anybody else can ever make that showing. So lots of people have held up Yoder over time as this, as this real almost centerpiece of the idea of parental rights and parental control. But the lower courts didn't think that that was right. What's happened, what happened last summer, the Supreme Court decided a case called uh Mahmoud against Taylor, which was a challenge to the to a part of the curriculum in Montgomery County, Maryland's public schools uh involving uh storybooks for elementary school kids that had LGBTQ characters. And some parents brought a challenge to that curriculum saying that they have a free exercise right not to have their kids exposed to anything that's a threat to, depending on when they what they said, the parents said either their religion or their kids' religion or their ability to teach their kids their religion. And they invoked Wisconsin against Yoder. The Supreme Court decided the case after in and in a number of other cases saying Yoder was special, wrote Yoder was about the Amish. The Supreme Court now said, no, no, Yoder is, like all our other cases, a big statement of principle that applies broadly. And this means that parents get to opt their children out of lessons, storybooks that the parents see as a threat. That's the word that the court used, a threat to the parents' religion or ability to teach, inculcate their religion in their kids. Yoder is now a really important decision that we have to sort out what it means for schools because of that decision.

SPEAKER_01: 13:47

Yeah, and that just adds absent the complication. Professor Katsky, again, thank you so much for your extra keys on Wisconsin versus Yoder and the free exercise clause.

SPEAKER_00: 13:58

Oh, absolutely. Great fun to do it.