Vocational training faced most of the difficulties that beset academic instruction in the classroom, plus a few of its own. Chief among these additional obstacles to the successful inculcation of work skills in the young was the pressing necessity of extracting large quantities of work from the students in order to keep the school running as economically as possible. When, finally, the ex-pupils from the residential schools faced racial prejudice as they sought jobs in the workplace, the dismal cycle of vocational futility was complete.

      Both academically and vocationally, then, the residential schools were systemically flawed. Their structure, staff, and methods guaranteed that the students would face extraordinary difficulties in obtaining either good academic education or useful vocational training. That such a self-crippling system was allowed to persist as long as it did -- until the 1950s at least -- raises an obvious question. Why was the instruction in residential schools structured so as virtually to guarantee futility and failure? In part the answer lies in ignorance of the difficulties of cross-cultural education and of assisting with socio-economic transformation. More relevant still was the federal government's fixation on costs. Better education would have been more expensive, and Native peoples, who could not vote until the 1960s, were not valued politically or otherwise. One symptom of the lack of official concern was the sloppy record-keeping that Richard King of Stanford University spotted at Carcross during his year there; another was the placing of a young Elijah Harper back in the same grade for a second year without explanation. Finally, and perhaps most critically, the schools' systemic educational failure was tolerated because neither of the non-Native participants expected Indians and Inuit to succeed. Unconsciously, government and church maintained a buckskin ceiling over the heads of the students. There was a low horizon for social mobility. And at the heart, of this class approach to residential school education lay that other pernicious force - race.