During the twentieth century the focus of vocational training at residential schools shifted, although there was not much difference in the outcome overall. First, the redefinition of the schools' purpose in 1910 to prepare students for a successful return to adult life in Indian country meant a scaling down of vocational programs such as trades instruction, apprenticeship for boys, and the outing system in general. The greatly increased emphasis on vocational instruction in the practically minded 1930s meant that there was a concerted effort to equip many of the residential schools with shops and instructors who could prepare the students with the job-market skills that Indian Affairs now recognized, belatedly, were required in a world where urbanization was far advanced and farming was in decline. However, Ottawa's attempt to place greater stress on vocational training was hampered by the financial stringency of the Depression and the Second World War. By the time renewed postwar prosperity permitted a dramatic expansion in school funding in the mid and late 1950s, the department was bending its efforts to find ways to get out of the residential school business, not to improve its vocational or academic offerings. The sorry tale of lost opportunities in vocational training simply epitomized the inadequate educational performance of the residential school system.

      Measures of that failure in academic and vocational education were numerous and pointed. One Indicator was the volume and timbre of Indian complaints about the instruction that children received in the schools. Sometimes the criticisms were general in nature, and often they were followed by a refusal to surrender their children to an unpopular principal. At other times, parents complained specifically if their children were kept from the classroom by too