Although the Jesuits modified their usual approach considerably when they began teaching elementary and coeducational classes on the St. Lawrence, few other concessions were made to local conditions and pupils. These experimental classes near Quebec adhered as closely as circumstances allowed to the Jesuits’ curriculum, pedagogical techniques (including a competitive atmosphere created by public prize-giving and exhibitions, a heavy emphasis on recitations, and examinations), strict discipline, and intensive proselytizing. Very quickly the Indian children responded with resistance and evasion to this harsh and unfamiliar regime. They either refused to cooperate or ran away, or both.

      The missionaries failed to appreciate that their rigorous pedagogy also was not compatible with the three Ls of traditional Native education.

      A further complication was that the schools failed to achieve their evangelical objective. The Jesuits, like their Récollet predecessors, had always hoped and expected that seminary schooling would both Christianize the Native children and enable the successful students in turn to proselytize. However, as a missionary explained in 1643, ‘the Seminary of the Hurons, which had been established…in order to educate children of that nation, was interrupted for good reasons, and especially because no notable fruit was seen among’ the Aboriginal constituency. In 1639 the Jesuits concluded that the ‘freedom of the children in these countries is so great, and they prove so incapable of government and discipline, that, far from being able to hope for the conversion of the country through the instruction of the children, we must even despair of their instruction without the conversion of the parents. Henceforth they would work to convert adults and to ensure ‘stable marriages,’ which was ‘the only means of furnishing the Seminaries with young plants.’