Although Native residential schools experienced severe financial problems almost uninterruptedly from the onset of the Great War until the aftermath of the Second World War, there were attempts in the twentieth century to improve the education that the schools provided. Unfortunately, most of these initiatives were frustrated by limited financial support from both government and churches.

      Two areas predominated with those who worried about the inadequacies of the residential schools. The first was the inability that many school-leavers experienced in adjusting to living and to earning a living. One aspect of the adjustment problem was the fact that prolonged schooling frequently assimilated young people so much that, like Georges Blondin and his brother, they 'were like aliens from outer space' to their community when they returned from school. The second was that some former students tried to put distance between themselves and their own racial groups.

      Residential schooling made it difficult for many graduates to adjust successfully to familial relationships and domestic tasks. Some observers even thought that residential schools so thoroughly institutionalised Native children that they could not function without institutional structures. A worker with the Vancouver YWCA found that residential schools had 'institutionalised' young people and thereby prepared them better for jail than for life on the outside. 'I used to work with female offenders in Oakalla and was surprised at the number of Indian girls who would say how similar the prison was to school, only the food was better in prison.'

      The same forces that had for so long retarded the modernisation and improvement of the residential schools ensured that the Special Joint Committee hearings did not lead to the overhaul the schools needed. The extensive revision of the Indian Act in 1951 left the inadequate education structures of the Indian Affairs Branch intact and the assimilative purpose of the school system unchallenged.