Throughout the twentieth century, and even earlier, adults have attempted to publicly control, and even censor, teenagers' access to various artifacts of mass culture—including magazines, music, comic books, movies, television and radio programs, and books. The motivation has been twofold: to shield the young from certain perceived pernicious influences and to encourage a national cultural uniformity/conformity heavily motivated by Christian morality and the dread of racial (and class) mixing. Fears of youthful extremism, sparked by corrupting influences, have waxed and waned, depending on various social, political, economic, cultural, technological, and other configurations. But attempts at censorship have generally continued, earmarking even newer forms of mass communication, most recently cable television and the computer Internet. Any understanding of this development must take into consideration both the fears and motivations of the adult majority, as well as the complexities of modern youth culture, all within a larger national matrix. Adults' fear of youthful rebellion and their urge to control youth became particularly glaring during the 1950s, when the winds of change seemed particularly brisk.

On February 3, 1803, the brand new building that was to revivify both student and academic life at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, burned to the ground. It was a devastating loss felt by the whole community. Yet Charles Nisbet, the college's principal for seventeen years, reported the event to a friend in sardonic fashion. The trustees had urged that Dickinson emulate Princeton, the more successful Presbyterian-backed enterprise in New Jersey. “We have now attained a pretty near conformity to it,” he wrote, “by having our Building burnt down to the ground [the same fate having overtaken Princeton's newly rebuilt college some months before] …. But it could not stand, as it was founded on Fraud & Knavery. The Trustees, in order to procure money for finishing this Building, sold the Certificates that furnished the salaries of the masters…. This awful Visitation of Divine Providence has taken more from them than all they have taken from me, tho' I do not think it will awaken them to do more justice.” While money was a constant source of contention between Nisbet and the trustees of Dickinson, they had taken much more than that from the Scottish cleric. Their knavery had included thwarting his godly mission to educate part of the post-Revolutionary generation of Americans. And it was not just the trustees; the students themselves, and their parents as well, had done their part to frustrate him. In fact, all of American culture, or so Nisbet thought, had prevented him from enlightening the wilderness.

During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, publicly controlled common school systems took root in many parts of North America; the province of Ontario was no exception. Although antecedents in that province stretched back to 1816, during the 1840s, in particular, a series of school acts was passed to provide for the establishment and maintenance of common schools in rural and urban communities alike. These schools were financed by a combination of government grants and local taxation and managed by locally elected school trustees, while a fledgling provincial bureaucracy provided guidelines for the certification of teachers, the approval of texts, and the distribution of government grants. Within that framework, local people established public, state-funded schools, which gradually replaced earlier, more ad hoc forms of educational provision and which by 1850 provided most children with all the education they would ever receive. In most rural communities, the new state educational apparatus produced only a one-room school offering little more than the rudiments. On the other hand, many urban communities across Ontario constructed much more sophisticated systems, including graded primary schools, and central or union schools, which sometimes offered instruction in what would now be considered secondary education.