Evolution Of Residential Schools

Residential schools were government sponsored religious schools established to assimilate Indigenous children into Canadian culture. Some of the primary objectives of the residential schools were to remove and isolate children from their homes, cultures, traditions, and families. They believed the Aboriginal cultures and spiritual beliefs were unequal and inferior. At first students were sent to the schools by their parents as some of the parents first believed that the school would be good for their children, thinking that it would benefit the children. But then the children started getting taken away from their homes and taken to the residential schools. The kids were ripped from their own homes, families, traditions, and language.

The peak of residential schools was in 1931. The first residential school opened in 1848 and was located in Muncey Town Ontario and it closed in 1948. There was a total of eighty schools in Canada around this point. The last residential school operated in Canada by the government, was the Gordon Indian Residential school in Saskatchewan and it closed in 1996 it had more than seventeen thousand enrolled students.
The children had their hair cut off, they were given different clothing, and also given new names. At the schools the Teaching focused mostly on practical day to day learning skills. Girls were primarily taught to do laundry, cook, sew and clean. Meanwhile the boys were taught farming, carpentry and tinsmithing. Many students did work for the school although they went unpaid, girls did housekeeping and the boys did general maintenance. There was not a lot of time spent in the classroom most students had only reached grade five by the age of eighteen. Because of this many students were discouraged from pursuing further education and the students were sent