In early March 1953, the Americans for the Competitive Enterprise System (ACES), a private, business-backed economic education association, opened up shop in Reading, Pennsylvania. Founded three years earlier in Philadelphia, ACES sought to “demonstrate the superiority of the American competitive system over any forms of collectivism.” To achieve that goal, the organization distributed literature, created a speakers’ bureau, and offered educational activities for clergy, women's groups, and industrial workers. ACES’ most extensive program, however, targeted high school students. It consisted of a three-day schedule of activities that included classroom instruction in economics and tours of local industries. In 1953, after having successfully established a program in the Philadelphia public and parochial schools, ACES sought to expand its base of operations throughout Pennsylvania with chapters in Harrisburg, Lancaster, Erie, and Reading. Although unions throughout the state were suspicious of the organization from its inception, ACES met the strongest resistance in Reading. In that city, local socialists and trade unionists immediately mobilized along class lines and blocked ACES from gaining access to the Reading public school classrooms.

Since the early nineteenth century, the idea of American prisons, like the idea of common schools, has reflected a faith in public institutions for effecting social reform through individual transformation. With this goal in mind, penal theory has been a type of educational theory, making a systematic, sustained effort to “correct” the behavior and ideas of inmates. What has set penal theory apart from educational theory—and prisons apart from schools—are other social functions of imprisonment: retribution for crimes committed, custodial control that separates the inmate from society, and deterrence. The goal of punishment has dominated the evolution of American prisons; nevertheless, as “total” institutions prisons have had their own paeadia and this paeadia—along with its relationship to punishment—has changed significantly over time.

The stormy history of church-state relations has often appeared in the history of education in various countries, and in this regard Australia is no exception. Additional complexity occurs when different denominations are involved. In the case of Australia's Lutherans internal splits were reflected in the creation of separate Lutheran synods and educational systems. This essay concentrates chiefly upon the educational efforts of those Lutherans, overwhelmingly German, who first emigrated to Australia's southern states during the period 1838–1850, taking their place amongst the original pioneers of that vast new land.