In contrast to where Wilson saw the schools shift into industrial schools, Coates believed that the “experiences at centres…functioned primarily as babysitting centres.” Noting how teachers taught students to disregard their culture and were not trained adequately for the economic opportunities “open “to them. Therefore, Coates appears to make Aboriginals appear incapable of learning as the reason for residential school failure and reason for their inadequacy for economic ventures. Therefore, Coates concludes that the residential schools were a failure as: “Instructors began anew with students who had long since forgotten the previous year’s lessons” ; along with “Few students passed beyond the third grade, even though their names may …show more content…
In contrast to the prior historians, Miller While examines the “effectiveness of both students’ and parents’ protests [which] depended on a series of particular, often local, circumstances”. From a methodology standpoint, there is a shift to start viewing resistance as agency with Miller. However, despite the perception from the book was that despite the various types of resistance, Miller was unclear of the potency even towards the end of the arguments claiming within his paper “What is less clear about resistance by both parents and schoolchildren is how effective their deeds and arguments were.” , leaning towards the prior author Coates who also did not see much power in Native opinion or …show more content…
Milloy focuses on the impact of the geographical placement of the institutions by the government. Furthermore, Milloy believed that the buildings were “hurriedly constructed of poor materials, badly laid without provisions for lighting, heating or ventilating” and that in general most schools ran in a bad state. In comparison to focusing on academic successes or failures, Milloy focused more on government’s role in the upkeep of most residential schools for how it affected the success of the aboriginal schools rather than blaming agents or the aboriginals