reeducation programs

Reeducation programs are systematic efforts to change people's political beliefs, values, or behaviors through intensive instruction and indoctrination.

The term carries sinister connotations from its association with authoritarian regimes—Soviet gulags, Chinese labor camps, Cambodian killing fields—where dissidents were subjected to forced ideological training, often with brutal methods.

Prisoners in the reeducation camp were made to confess their ideological errors.

The phrase now appears in debates about any institutional effort perceived as coercive ideological training, sometimes hyperbolically.