" A more disturbing campaign to change the Uyghur human terrain involves the educational system in the Uyghur region. While the process of making the schools in the region teach exclusively in Chinese had been underway since the early 2000s, changes in 2017 served to create one education path of assimilation for a few of the brightest Uyghurs while promoting a path of marginalization for the majority. As for all students in China, Uyghurs’ educational and career paths are determined by their performance on a nationwide exam taken between eighth grade and high school. Those who pass are given a standard academic high school education, and those who do not are relegated to vocational schools. While the transition to all-Chinese-language instruction had already required Uyghur students to take this exam in Chinese and attend high school or vocational training in the Chinese language, affirmative action programs encouraging the integration of Uyghurs into PRC society had long given them a 50-point advantage on their test grade. In 2017, this advantage was slashed to 15 points, thus dramatically reducing the number of Uyghurs attending academic high schools.107

As a result, high schools in the Uyghur region now have a much higher proportion of Han students, providing for a more assimilation-ist experience for those Uyghurs who do get admitted. Furthermore, since such schools are mostly located in urban areas, the rural Uyghur students who do get admitted must study in boarding school environments, which further separate them from their culture and language.108 For those who do not get admitted, they are generally relegated to the new system of coerced labor connected to the internment camps through the ‘surplus rural labor’ program and its ‘reeducation lite’ curriculum or sent to work and be simultaneously re-educated in larger factories in inner China. Thus, whichever path they are afforded, this system assumes that their future will be much less ingrained in Uyghur culture than that of their parents "

" Adrian Zenz has done ground-breaking research on this subject and has found that Chen Quanguo’s administration may have had plans for massive forced intergenerational separation even prior to the establishment of the mass internment camps. According to Zenz, Chen had already established in his first month in office a plan to institute universal preschool for the children of the Uyghur region within the course of a year.109 However, the actual implementation of this plan not surprisingly corresponds with 2017, the year that mass internment began. By late February 2017, the government began construction of 4,387 preschools that were intended to serve 562,900 new students, particularly in the south of the Uyghur homeland, with a completion deadline before the beginning of the 2017–2018 school year.110 While this goal itself appeared ambitious, it is noteworthy that during the 2017–2018 school year, the number of children enrolled in preschool was far greater than this target. While the total preschool intake target for the region in fall 2017 had been around one million, the actual number enrolled was closer to 1.4 million.111 Furthermore, Zenz suggests that a substantial number of these new preschool students appeared to attend institutions with the capacity to house boarding students from a very early age. "