ABSTRACT
In modern nation-states, education is an important institution of nation building. A modern education system is perceived as key to a broader ‘modernization project’ aimed at nurturing new generations of educated, skilled and patriotic citizens. Gellner (1983) notes that, unlike traditional agrarian societies, the reproduction of a modern society requires a centralized and standardized form of education to produce mobile human resources in order to sustain economic growth. Citizens of a modern polity depend on education to acquire generic skills, enhance employability, even to anchor their identity, rendering ‘the monopoly of legitimate education’ a more important tool and symbol of state power than the monopoly of legitimate violence (p. 34). Gellner (1983: 38) argues that the reproduction of a school-transmitted, literate, high culture in which all citizens ‘breathe and speak and produce’ necessarily leads to cultural homogenization that manifests itself as ‘nationalism’. In other words, he contends that it was the imperative of developing a modern industrialized society, through the education system, that constituted the driving force behind nationalism.
