Among the few innovations in the aftermath of the Special Joint Committee and the 1951 amendment was a greater emphasis on secondary education. A resolute refusal to provide high school instruction in the residential schools had been one of their distinctive, or disfiguring, characteristics throughout the twentieth century.

      Not surprisingly, the residential schools were not successful academically. Indian Affairs' own statistics show that in 1930, 75% of aboriginal students across Canada were stuck below Grade 3. Only 3 in a hundred ever went past Grade 6.

      A racist assumption that Native children were not capable of success at a relatively advanced academic level both justified and perpetuated the failure of the school system to produce high school graduates at a time when that was becoming the norm in non-Native schools. The retention of the half-day system largely on financial grounds compounded the problem, as did Ottawa's failure prior to the 1940s and 1950s to insist on the hiring of professionally trained teachers. By the spring of 1944 the man in charge of the Indian Affairs Branch had to admit, 'We have at this date less than 80 pupils in the whole of the Dominion engaged in high school studies at departmental expense.'

      If the department's persistent integration policy worked a hardship on the missionaries who operated the residential schools in the decade after the Special Joint Committee, other department efforts were better received. As noted earlier, Indian Affairs during the 1950s attempted to provide greater assistance in a number of areas. Efforts were continued, within the limits of the overall assimilative objective of schooling policy, to introduce materials that at least mentioned original people.