This chapter considers efforts to develop South Vietnam’s education system.The discussion centers on the US Operations Mission and International Voluntary Services(IVS) education advisers who introduced American-style schools and English-language instruction.These aid workers believed that their efforts would not only help modernize South Vietnamese society but also advance counterinsurgency aims.To explore the tension between those often-competing impulses, the chapter examines the IVS education team’s involvement in the strategic hamlet program.Its participation in strategic hamlets represented IVS’s most striking acceptance of a South Vietnamese and US policy that had little connection to humanitarian or economic development but rather accelerated military escalation in Vietnam.