This ties into, in my opinion, a problem with how history is understood in modern times. There’s basically two, deeply flawed, ways that I observe most people talk about historical actions and figures. One is “hagiography” where we engage in mindless worship of our forebears, and aggressively resist any critical analysis of their failures. Another is “history by screech” which is where people, outraged by people long dead not living up to modern standards, believe the primary analysis of their lives should be pointing out their failures and dismissing most anything else they ever did. Thomas Jefferson perfectly encapsulates this dichotomy. If you worship Thomas Jefferson, you have a wrong and distorted view of history, and ignore his personal moral failings (some even in the context of his own times), and ways in which Jefferson did not always live up to his own enlightenment principles. On the flipside, if the only way you can talk about Thomas Jefferson is to just yell "He owned slaves!’, then you’re a shit historian, if that’s really all you can learn from someone like Jefferson.
A big issue is these are “pop cultural” schools of historical thought. The real professional historians tend to handle things a lot better. But a lot of society’s view of history is at present defined by mass media, pop culture etc, not by a reserved reading of professional historical works.
The residential schools in both the United States and Canada were best understood by actually understanding the thinking of the times. While it seems alien to us now, in many respects these schools represented a progression in thought by white men. The previous school of thought was largely that the indigenous peoples were incorrigible savages, and this informed much of white policy towards them. The more “enlightened” view that came later, was that the native is no more incapable of “civilization” than is the white man. But it would require the native to be white in how they were educated and raised.
So while it may be hard with modern views to view this as “progressive” in many ways it was. The old prevailing thought was that these were inferior humans, cursed with a lack of capacity. The newer school of thought is they just had an “inferior culture” but as human beings they were capable of greater things. Of course the modern view is that their culture was not “inferior” but simply due to a long chain of events, many of which were simple accidents of history, they were less technologically advanced than Western European society. The view at the time these schools was established is that God had endowed the white man with a more enlightened and civilized culture, hence why white men had developed steam power, factories, written language, “modern” medical treatments, things of that nature. Recognizing that the indigenous people were not biologically inferior lead to a belief that they had an obligation to “raise them up” to the standards of white men. Since they viewed white society’s technological advances being directly tied to the cultural tenets of Western society, it was believed the only way you can achieve your goal is to, bluntly, make the Indians white. That means suppress their native language, suppress their native religion, suppress their native cultural practices, suppress their native forms of societal organization and governance, replace them with Western forms and teach them of their innate superiority.
The reality is, while this is rightly seen as a form of monstrous cultural genocide by modern times, it can’t be entirely denied that it also lead to some positive outcomes for native children that were denied previous generations–specifically certain educational opportunities. Education, the acquisition of literacy, competence at mathematics and formal logic have a lot of benefits for a person’s life, even if it is mixed with other, bad things. If you’re of one of those two flawed schools of pop-cultural historical thinking I outlined above, you might argue that “hey, we educated and improved their lives in many respects, and arguably they had things better than their forebears.” If you’re of the other school of thought, you might argue “white men did this because they were evil and no good came of it.” In my opinion neither view is accurate. Instead I think the white men involved genuinely felt they were reformers, but their views were massively informed by bigoted ideas of white superiority that ended up being very culturally destructive. This was something we did not properly recognize as a “problem” until much later, which is something people should seriously reflect on and bring to attention.