It was revealing that Ottawa's first concerted attempt to organise Indian education after Confederation was termed 'industrial' schools. The requirement that students carry out half a day's work would mould them for the Euro-Canadian world of work, in which clocks, whistles, and schedules were becoming dominant, while simultaneously subsidising the operation of the schools. Student labour was an indirect, hidden 'grant' - assuming that involuntary contributions can be termed 'grants' - to the educational system that increasingly was imposed on reluctant Aboriginal peoples. Unfortunately, the people who suffered most from this change were the young labourers, the school children.

      Native residential schools, like other contemporary industrial institutions, quickly developed an unhealthy emphasis on extracting labour that had little, if anything, to do with vocational and trades instruction.

      Pernicious forms of this involuntary servitude were the apprenticeship programs and the 'outing system' that prevailed in many schools, particularly from the 1880s until the 1940s. Making male students available during the summer to work on farms owned by non-Natives, or putting a young woman out at service with a family in town, resembled a method of furnishing cheap, semi-skilled labour to Euro-Canadian homes more than it did a system of advanced training. Placing girls as domestic servants in non-Native homes in particular was reminiscent of some of the worst features of New Brunswick's Indian College of the late eighteenth century. The first generation of western missionaries expected that school-trained 'girls would help to solve the servant girl problem in the west until such time as they married with some of the young men graduates.' For a long time it was considered advisable to send girls to town to work as maid, nannies, and general household assistants. To a considerable extent this arrangement was merely a continuation of their employment as domestic workers in the schools, or in some cases as the private maids and helpers of principals' wives.