Compounding the problems of learning for both teachers and sttidents was the inappropriateness of curriculum and learning aids. As the 1927 report of the department noted, 'At all Indian schools, provincial curricula are followed and fully qualified teachers engaged whenever possible.' However in no province was the curriculum attuned, or even sensitive, to the social and cultural environment from which the Native children came. Many references were to places, people, and things that did not resonate with the children, and no doubt the consequence was to increase the alien and unappealing aura that the classroom already had for the students. The emphasis in history, for example, on British and Canadian pageants in which non-white peoples were enemies of progress to be overcome reinforced the message of Native inferiority and unacceptability that the total experience of the residential school impressed on the youthful inmates.

      The major exception to the rule of curricular inappropriateness was music instruction. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Native students enjoyed music even when it came from an alien cultural environment. In any event, former teachers and students agree unanimously that music and sports were the saving features of' residential school experience. Staff gratefully clung to periods of music instruction as respites from the rigours of attempting to teach, and students long remembered music as a haven in an inhospitable academic landscape.

      Music aside, the academic experience that residential school children underwent was difficult, inefficient, and largely unproductive. As the figures on age-grade distribution of the students inevitably indicated, and as parental complaints often confirmed, most students simply did not obtain sufficient academic learning to become successful in most lines of paid employment.