This system is a lumbering, unconscionably expensive apparatus that can only be administered by an entity the size of a state. One of the key requirements for creating a nation is control of the education system. Appropriately, this is also the type of person its institutions produce. To put it simply the modern nation is characterized by homogeneity, anonymity and functional literacy. As defined by Gellner, the nation is a unit large enough to reproduce itself through education, ideologically bound to a single literate culture and consisting mostly of deracinated ("gelded"), interchangeable people who can be moved with little retraining between the various occupations demanded by society. Into this breach emerged what we call nationalism, which remains the system that the overwhelming majority of human beings live under today. The sudden emergence of industrial society required a new type of person as well as a new organizing principle to support itself.
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