The department believed that the schools should have both their academic and their vocational training programs reduced, and more oversight applied to the whole enterprise. 'The chief aim should be to train the Indian youths how to earn a livelihood when they return to the reserves, and it seems altogether out of the question for the Department to undertake to educate a large number of Indians with the idea of making them equal to white men by the process of education.'

    Because these reduced expectations were shared by some of the missionary organizations, it became almost possible during the first decade of the twentieth century to dismantle the system that had been developed since Davin's 1879 report. An experienced Presbyterian missionary on the prairies pointed out in 1903 that the schools were not achieving their spiritual, academic, or vocational objectives. The nub of the problem was that the churches were trying to 'educate & colonize a people against their will.' Church and government had to learn that 'to educate a boy against his will is like dressing up a dead branch with flowers: there will be no fruit.'

    Health, financial and recruitment problems played into the hands of the laymen in charge of the Anglicans' Missionary Society of the Church in Canada. Sam Blake, a prominent Toronto lawyer and a strongly evangelical churchman, brought to his activities on the executive of the MSCC both prodigious energy and a passion for overseas missions. Increasingly Blake perceived Indian missions in western Canada as costly obstacles to the MSCC's forging ahead with much more interesting evangelical work in Asia. The more he studied these schools and the missionaries who conducted them, the more disillusioned and angry he became. Blake and Dr. Bryce collaborated on assembling and disseminating data on the poor health conditions among western Indians, Bryce in hopes of improving conditions and Blake with a view to closing schools.