The history of Canadian residential schools is significantly darker, predicated on what we would now call cultural genocide, by legally enshrining the mandatory education of youths in a way that was intended to assimilate them. One report from the Canadian "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" opens with this quotation:

"In order to educate the children properly we must separate them from their families. Some people may say that this is hard but if we want to civilize them we must do that.” Hector Langevin, Public Works Minister of Canada, 1883

That summary report, whose intent is to compile a public government history of the residential school era can be viewed here.

The University of British has this informative and short summary of residential schools which is thoroughly sourced. Conditions at schools forbid students from speaking their native language, separated students from family members and by gender, offered students poor quality education compared to standard Canadian schools, and students suffered psychological and rampant sexual abuse in addition to staggering mortality rates.

In 1907, government medical inspector P.H. Bryce reported that 24 percent of previously healthy Aboriginal children across Canada were dying in residential schools.5 This figure does not include children who died at home, where they were frequently sent when critically ill. Bryce reported that anywhere from 47 percent (on the Peigan Reserve in Alberta) to 75 percent (from File Hills Boarding School in Saskatchewan) of students discharged from residential schools died shortly after returning home.6

Survivors of residential schools also disproportionately held criminal records, and suffered lifelong damage. Residential schools were fundamentally different in intent and practice from standard Canadian schools of the same time periods, and they are one of the darkest chapters in Canadian history.