The plain truth about shunning?

* AMERICAN EXPERIENCE. THE AMISH: SHUNNED. 9 tonight, WHYY12.

THERE'S a longing that permeates tonight's "The Amish: Shunned," and it comes from both sides of what for a long time seemed to be a wall of silence.

Getting the Amish - members of a culture that literally has no use for television - to break that silence would have been hard enough before "reality" TV came calling, repeatedly, for their children.

Before "Amish in the City," "Amish: Out of Order," "Breaking Amish" and even (shudder) "Amish Mafia."

By now it's astonishing that they'll talk to anyone with a microphone at all.

Yet, it's the voices of the Amish - quiet but insistent as they state the case for their way of life and for the shunning they regard as an occasional, cruel necessity - that makes this edition of PBS's "American Experience," like its 2012 predecessor, "The Amish," so powerful, and so sad.

They may not have electricity, much less flat screens, but the Amish whom "Shunned" writer, director and producer Callie T. Wiser spoke with were, she said in a recent interview, well aware of the way they were being portrayed in the outside world.

And it wasn't making her job any easier. "I don't think we could have made 'The Amish' now," said Wiser of the earlier "American Experience" film, which she helped produce.

Working on "The Amish: Shunned," "I felt vitriol that I never felt before," Wiser said, "because they're so disgusted with how those shows operate.

"People who knew me before [from 'The Amish'] make a distinction. People who did not know me have a much harder time making that distinction and understanding the difference in what we are aiming to do and what those other shows are aiming to do. Public television says a lot. Saying we are working for public television, we're not selling advertisements," she said.

"Shunned," of necessity, devotes much of its attention to the stories of seven people who are, at least at the time of filming, no longer living as Amish, but excerpts from Wiser's off-camera interviews with others - including, she said, some from Pennsylvania's Lancaster County - provide a respectful counterpoint.

One of the seven, Naomi Kramer, left her Old Order Amish community in Missouri reluctantly, and only over a period of years, to pursue a bachelor's degree in nursing - a formidable task for someone who'd had to leave school at 13, with the eighth-grade education that the Amish consider sufficient (and that may help drive decision-making for those who haven't yet joined the church).

"I had to start by getting my [high school] GED," she told reporters during the Television Critics Association's winter meetings. "Nursing includes a lot of science courses, and I had no background in any kind of science." Remarkably, it still took her only five years to get her degree, while working 30 to 40 hours a week to support herself.

In "Shunned," Kramer is shown raising money for a scholarship fund that seeks to help people in similar situations.

"In the dominant culture of America, I would have been like the good kid, putting myself through college and working full time," she says in the film. "But to the Amish, I was a little bit of a rebel."

A rebel who knows, at least, where she comes from.

"A lot of women we fund [for scholarships] . . . apply for nursing," Kramer told reporters. "I think it's they're very nurturing, [with the] kind of caring that we're taught as Amish."

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