You have to go back to our colonial history to understand that contrast.
According to the Augustine doctrine within Christianity, Catholics baptize children at birth because they are born in a state of sinfulness. When children are born, they are seen as bad with madness in their hearts that has to be beaten out with the rod. That's what the scriptures say.
That belief was predominant across the western world. It even goes back to the Middle Ages. That legacy of the church was passed down here in America at the time of colonization.
Indigenous people had a very different vision of education and children. In the western view, parentage was very hierarchical. Everything started with the father, the woman was his subordinate and the children were the subjects of the parents, their chattel even. Instead of that triangular vision, indigenous people saw a circle. The child was seen as an awashish, which means “little being of light”. The light also represented the energy of the creator. For indigenous people, not only was the child a symbol of purity, but a child's birth was the miracle of life. The child was literally a reflection of the creator who came into this world, but he was not the creator himself. I want to make that clear so as not to offend Christians; that's not it at all. In any case, indigenous people saw purity in the child. It was not seen as a chattel.
What the residential schools did was simply take children who had been raised with a certain view of the world that was completely different from the western world view, one that had its good and bad aspects but was beautiful, and impose a new world view on them. The children were told that their ancestors were pagans, that they did not know the one true god and that they could be subjected to much corporal punishment because of the bad in them. That violence was beaten into them, just as I was imbued with violence as a child when I was hit with a stick. I was imbued with a certain view of the world, just as the children in residential schools were. Afterwards, these children returned to their communities carrying the violence they had suffered inside them.