How taditional values, wisdom can be passed away to younger generation.

ItElders passing away with their traditional values and wisdom is true especially in the African continent where the elders are the main source of traditional values and unfortunately many of them cannot read and write. Their knowledge of the traditional values is only limited to oral. They don’t have them in books as they cannot write. Consequently, when they pass away, they go with theese knowledge just like a library being burnt. For traditional values and wisdom to be passed away to next generation, my solutions are as follows.

First and foremost, Elders should be involved in children education both at home and at school. In Africa for example, given their illiteracy, elders are put far away from children education, children are spending less time with their parents, especially the elders, making it hard for them to acquire tradition values or wisdom. I would then suggest that elders be involved in children school education mainly at school by having them teach once in a week in every class. This teaching will be especially about what they believe as important cultural values that children should know. There should not be any typical curriculum for that. These elders should be selected by each community on the basis of the knowledge of traditional values and should be left with the freedom to develop their own curriculums and class plans.

Another suggestion is to have some writers collaborate with some very knowledgeable elders in each community, listen to them and help them publish books containing traditional values which should include in the school curriculum. In fact, since most of the elders especially in Africa don’t know how to read nor to write, it would be a great idea for them to tell some stories to those who can do it so that they write them down for next generation to read.

My last suggestion is to sensitize people over the fact thaat they will always need their origins to make headways in their life. They should understand that learning new things does not necessarily imply that they should give up what they knew, people all over the world should learn how to incorporate modernity into their traditional values. In some parts of the world, children are ashamed to live traditionally. They are more motivated in learning what come from western countries rather than what come from their own countries. This is mainly true in developing countries. We should work toward changing this mentality. Some children don’t want to spend too much time with their grandfathers because they believe that their vision of the world is an outdated one.