Could you elaborate more on the school of friendship being a re-education camp?
@cripplepunk-sylveon, let me know if there's anything you want to expand on or that I missed. Okay so, Friendship is presented in the text as an integral and nearly unique part of pony culture. It is only by the grace of Friendship that literal demons don't render all of Equestria a frozen wasteland. The narrative of MLP: FiM gives ponies a cultural monopoly on prosocial behavior, which ends up evolving into ponies having the responsibility to culturally assimilate other species.
The movie in particular emphasizes that the creatures outside Equestria Don't Do Friendship Like We Do, and that it makes the outside world a bleak and dangerous place to hapless prosocial ponies. Our protagonists only gain the allies they need by converting the natives into thinking how they do. If I had to pick a point where FiM began to go off the rails in this sense, it would be the movie.
The following season has the friendship map start sending pairs of ponies on what's essentially missionary work. Two ponies go to see other species, find a foreign culture that's Doing Prosocial Behavior Wrong, and fix it by teaching them to Do Prosocial Behavior Right, Like We Do.
(I will sidestep the Unfortunate Implications of dragons, the Icky Boys gender stereotype species, needing to be taken over by a girl to teach them how to behave. I will sidestep the Unfortunate Implications of dragons, the Icky Boys gender stereotype species, needing to be taken over by a girl to teach them how to behave. I will sidestep the Unfortunate Implications of dragons, the Icky Boys gender stereotype species, needing to be taken over by a girl to teach them how to behave.)
And then, ultimately, the Friendship School gets built. If it were simply a school for ponies, it would simply be poorly thought out (none of the Mane Six have teaching degrees, they hire no real teachers to teach non-Friendship-related subjects or even substitute when the Mane Six needs to go be magical heroes, they let Glimglam be guidance counselor even though she's still working on her own stuff). But no. They bring in nonpony students from other countries to live at the school, fully immersed in pony culture and fully taught by pony missionaries how to think and act like ponies, on the explicit basis that their home cultures are inferior and need to be fixed by Teaching Them Friendship. This has highly uncomfortable historical parallels with USian and Canadian Indian residential schools. The Student Six also have significant historical parallels with political hostages, a favourite assimilation/control tool of the Roman Empire.
(Oh, hey, you remember that episode where one of the Student Six vandalized the Friendship Christmas tree and Twilight threatened to let none of them go back home to their families over break, and instead be forced to undergo more intense Friendship Studies if no-one confessed? Horrifying!)
And Spike caps off the series (Distant Epilogue notwithstanding) with the line "The more creatures learn about friendship, the safer we'll be!", by which point the show has so fully equivocated Friendship with pony culture that it's an explicit endorsement of cultural assimilation as a national security imperative. I have no fucking clue how that line was allowed to be aired.
