No matter how imaginative school authorities became about recreation activities in the closing decades of the residential school system, the institutions remained oppressive to students because of their heavy workloads. Although the theory of residential schooling emphasised the importance of work to the inculcation of needed skills, the reality in most schools down to the 1950s was that work was a means of supporting the institution rather than a form of instruction.

       It was also clear that certain classes of students found themselves assigned unusually heavy amounts of work. It was also common to keep grown students around the school for their sheer work value. At the Anglicans' Sarcee school near Calgary what was officially designated industrial training was, in fact, unpaid labour to run the school. It was little wonder that both Indian parents and the occasional school principal complained loudly about the situation. The agent at Duck Lake told the commissioner as early as 1896 that parents were unimpressed by the 'industrial' training their children received because 'such employment he can get at home.' What seems strangest of all, in retrospect, is the realisation that there was little evidence that officialdom, whether bureaucratic or church, recognised the toll that the work took on students, both academically and physically.