Many schools in the USA are indistinguishable from minimum security prisons and detention centers. The only major physical feature that separates them is that schools tend to have larger parking lots and lack guard towers.
Whether you are talking about Xinjiang education centers or compulsory government schools in the USA the excuse for them is going to be along the lines of 'We need to ensure that these people become productive members of society'.
All in all they are compulsory miserable dehumanizing places that are designed to condition and manipulate people into what 'society' demands from them; as defined by the ruling authorities. In both cases anybody attempting to avoid conditioning and years in "detention" is guilty of a criminal act.
My point being that these things are not differences of types, but of degrees. And while it's easy to point fingers and laugh and pride yourself on the superiority of your own country, the take home lesson shouldn't be how much better America is then China, but to use them as a mirror to examine how and why things are better here and how to improve on them.
Reductio ad absurdum. Why don't we say society itself is a miserable dehumanizing construct, the very first layer of expectation foisted upon our free natural selves? A country has borders... what are those but abstract prison walls?
If you are saying elementary schools are reasonably comparable to concentration camps, you have lost the thread of the conversation.
Hand-waving and semantic games don't change the original discussions: who would you rather hold power over you?
1. A democratic government that enshrines human and political rights
2. An authoritarian ethnonationalist oligarchy that enshrines the primacy of the Party
Whoever powers your chips will at least potentially have that power over you. We're in an era where we can decide, but anything can change. Our choices and the values we act on now will set the stage for what is available to us in the future.
Whether you are talking about Xinjiang education centers or compulsory government schools in the USA the excuse for them is going to be along the lines of 'We need to ensure that these people become productive members of society'.
All in all they are compulsory miserable dehumanizing places that are designed to condition and manipulate people into what 'society' demands from them; as defined by the ruling authorities. In both cases anybody attempting to avoid conditioning and years in "detention" is guilty of a criminal act.
My point being that these things are not differences of types, but of degrees. And while it's easy to point fingers and laugh and pride yourself on the superiority of your own country, the take home lesson shouldn't be how much better America is then China, but to use them as a mirror to examine how and why things are better here and how to improve on them.