Government Control in Canadian Residential Schools and Fahrenheit 451 Government control is often seen in real world circumstances, as well as in fiction novels. Indian residential schools were government-funded religious schools whose goal was to assimilate Aboriginal children into Euro-Canadian society. (Miller) About 150, 000 Aboriginal children attended these schools that operated from 1831 to 1996, when the last residential school closed down. (Miller) The novel Fahrenheit 451, written by Ray Bradbury in 1953, is a dystopian tale set in a futuristic society where books are banned and firemen start fires instead of putting them out. The society in the story does not accept individuality or intellectual thought and the government has great control over the citizens. The Canadian Indian residential school system had many similar methods of control to the government in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Both administrations destroyed items and ideas of the past, withheld and restricted information available to its subjects, and punished those who disobeyed. This comparison displays how residential schools have common manipulation techniques to the ministry in Fahrenheit 451. Firstly, residential schools and the government in Fahrenheit 451 demolished parts of history as a method of controlling their students or citizens. The intention of residential schools were to obliterate Aboriginal culture and to convert Aboriginal children into the Euro-Canadian way of living. (“The