Again, pretty stupid to make these boarding schools out to be some kind of Cultural genocide thing. These are just a feature of rural China, even for Han. It’s a solution to a difficult problem. You can either build a decent boarding school in a more populated town, or you can build a bunch of sh*t schools in the middle of nowhere like America does. The trade off is less parental contact for better quality education. There’s no perfect solution.
The article also mentions being forced from “traditional rural life” into vocational training. This is a joke. The “traditional rural life” that I saw in some videos from a friend who does work in these kinds of areas is an unimaginable poverty that we cannot understand as we type out our posts from $1000 cell phones and drive Teslas. Collecting kindling for heating, subsistence farming, etc. For us here, we might grow vegetables for fun and if we suck it’s just a joke. For them, they f*cking starve.
A big reason why many poor villagers are “forced” (applies to all over rural China, not just Tibet, and I would put it as “guided”) to vocational training is because it yields immediate economic benefit to the rural poor. They are going to be making in a month in a factory what they probably made in a whole year before. Second, it is extremely difficult to explain to people coming from such extreme impoverishment (and basically no exposure to the modern economy) how something like university education can pay off in the long term. The hope is that by getting these people vocational training, they will learn by exposure to more developed cities and hopefully encourage the next generation (or younger family) to seek higher education.
A lot of this info can also be gleaned from poverty alleviation videos from Chinese media.
You see, you are trying to make logical sense of a propagadanda hit piece that was designed to appeal to emotions, which is why it looks ridiculous when you analyze it that way.
The narrative is designed to invoke an image of those old schools you see in movie or something, where the pupils are slapped if they dared to use their left hand to write, and speak in their local dialect or something like that. So in other words, pretty oppressive sh*t. As for the adults, it's the old editing tricks that evokes images of "Konzentrationslager" with "Arbeit macht frei" as theme (i.e. vocation training).
Put together, it is meant to evoke an emotional response to the effect of "ZOMG the ebil Han-supremacist SeeSeePee is actively genociding the $LOCAL_MINORITY in $CURRENT_YEAR!!1!!1!". You were not meant to think about it too hard, because then the narrative will fall apart. And if the narrative gets planted into people's head first, it is very hard to displace it, because evidences to the contrary can always explained away somehow. After all, I, too, believe that Bielefeld is fake news
Now for my hot take: "cultural genocide", when taken to its logical conclusion, includes standardized education. Think about it, a standardized education is meant to take someone, strip them of local cultural context (aka family), and mold them into a standardized worker. Even if there was no overt effort to suppress any local language, the fact that education materials are written in a standardized language and not the local one and that the educations are more often than not delivered in standardized language, meant that the local language (dialect, accent, whatever) will eventually be displaced.
This is why the whole "cultural genocide" thing is useless, because a lot of fairly mundane things can be thought of as such to the point where it dilutes the actual term "genocide".