... Contrast this with the position in the Australian colony where the first school had opened within a year, in 1789 (Barcan, 1980, p.9). Cleverley (1971) attributes this directly to the fact that Australia was a penal colony - "indeed, it was precisely because New South Wales was a penal colony that two schools, wholly supported by the government had opened by 1792 for the thirty-six children landed from the Fleet's transports" (Cleverley, 1971, p.1). This early demand for education in the Australian colony was based on the unique role education was thought to have in bringing about moral reform (Cleverley, 1971, p.11). Many influential colonists brought with them from England, the assumption that the convict population was incapable of genuine rehabilitation (Cleverley, 1971, p.8). In England during the 1780s, it is claimed by several authors (Cleverley, 1971; Holden, 1999) that the educational reform of prisoners was relatively unimportant. Rather, it was ...

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