Explain any one way of cultivating nationalism among citizens

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Nationalism can generate a sense of belonging to a large community in which everyone shares a cultural framework. To make nationalism a meaningful form of political identity, people must be encouraged to think they have much in common with those outside their immediate community. One key way that political elites construct nationalist identity is by making education compulsory and promoting mass literacy. An effective way to use literacy to construct nationalist identity is through primary and secondary education. Nationalism requires creating an emotional or psychological bond between large communities of strangers, something not easily learned by observing and imitating people in one's immediate surroundings. Literacy, mass schooling, and centralized control over education help explain the relative strength or weakness of nationalism across countries. Mass education helped weaken local and regional identities and construct nationalist ones by giving authority and legitimacy to nationally trained bureaucrats and teachers, as opposed to parents or prominent local figures. Mass education also succeeded by shifting the tools of cultural socialization from informal oral traditions to government-sanctioned formal texts replete with nationalist cultural messages.