The first known boarding-school arrangement for Indian youths in Canada began in 1620 under the auspices of the Récollets, an order of Franciscans, who took a number of boys into what they referred to grandly a their ‘seminary.’ Interestingly, the friars had decided to attempt residential schooling during an evaluation of their early missionary efforts held in 1616, less than a decade after the beginning of French settlement on the St. Lawrence.

      The Récollet boarding institution that opened in 1620 operated until the friars left the colony in 1629. In company with a number of French youths, several Indian boys who had been taken in by the Récollets were instructed in rudimentary subjects. However, the fact that four of the first eight Indian students were sent off to France for studies suggests that the experiment was not very successful.

      Brother Gabriel Sagard noted that his order ‘had made a beginning of teaching them their letters, but as they are all for freedom and only want to play and give themselves a good time, as I said, they forgot in three days what we had taken four to teach, for lack of perseverance and for neglect of coming back to us at the hours appointed them.’ The Franciscans found themselves unable to curb the Indian youths’ freedom-loving ways.

      By the end of the 1620s the Récollets had abandoned their efforts at evangelization through enforced cultural change, and by 1632 they had been excluded from the mission field of New France by policy-makers in France. Their replacements - the more numerous, more energetic and better-trained Jesuits - fared little better in spite of their more positive view of Indian nature and potential. Father Paul Le Jeune observed that when compared ‘with certain villagers’ back in France who had the advantage of acculturation if not necessarily schooling, the Indians of Canada ‘are more intelligent than our ordinary peasants.’