Sharing Traditions

• Frank LaPena's "Tradition Sharing" Frank LePena discusses the value of oral tradition. 
• He continues to tell all of his readers about his experiences and opinions concerning oral tradition in this article. 
• Oral tradition, he claims, is a type of human communication in which knowledge, art, ideas, and cultural material are absorbed, kept, and passed down orally from generation to generation. 
• In other terms, oral tradition refers to the oral transmission of cultural and value information from generation to generation.
• Speech or song, folktales, ballads, chants, prose or verses, and other forms of transmission are used. Oral tradition aids in the preservation of cultural values.
• The task of passing down tradition is not easy. The process of passing down tradition by oral means appears simple to talk about and write about, but it is rather difficult to put into practice. 
• Both elderly and young people play an important role in maintaining and preserving the culture's ideals.
• Speakers (elders) and listeners (young people or followers) play critical roles. 
• Young people must pay attention to and heed the advice of their elders when it comes to cultures, traditions, faiths, and values. 
• The elderly teach the young people about their customs and other cultural and value notions.
• Following the demise of senior persons, young people are accountable for filling their shoes.
• They must assume responsibility for passing down tradition from seniors through oral tradition in order to preserve their community's traditions and values. 
• As a result, the oral tradition continues to pass down through the generations, safeguarding customs and values. 
• Young people can keep seniors alive by preserving their views of tradition and understanding of community life.
• Elders are thought to be immortal and pass down from generation to generation. If we are aware of our culture, tradition will continue to move forward in a proper manner. 
• Elders' lifestyles, as well as their thoughts about life, belief, religion, culture, values, and so on, enabled them to achieve the optimum position in their lives. 
• For the sake of humanity, they continued to pass on their legacy orally from generation to generation. They demonstrated the righteous courses to follow in order to survive. Their acts of passing down tradition were for the sake of the next generation's future and their own lives. Oral tradition is a useful technique for learning about the natural world. It is the right method of safeguarding people's customs and values. According to the author, passing down oral traditions from generation to generation has several challenges.

Maintaining Oral Tradition 

It is vital to transmit down the oral tradition from generation to generation in order to preserve our culture. Young people must listen to and follow their elders in order to achieve their ideal status (niche). However, filling the positions of elders is a challenging undertaking. Because the elders' religious duties, such as faiths, ceremonies, dance, and so on, are tied to their culture, the young people and their interest in it appear to be lacking. Young people nowadays do not choose to listen to them and preserve culture and tradition. The elders' niche has become difficult to fill. As a result, there has been a problem in passing down oral traditions from generation to generation in order to preserve culture and values.

Impacts of modern technology on people: 

Every generation is confronted with fresh and advanced technology that replaces old objects and ideas. With the advancement of modern technology, the modern world and its people are undergoing significant changes. Various alterations are being done in this natural environment in the name of development. Traditional items are being phased out in favor of newer options. Due to contemporary technology, there has been a change in climate and the natural environment. People are shown as being overly preoccupied with modern technologies. They have been estranged from one another as a result of modern technologies and their isolation. Due to a lack of active listeners or followers, it is difficult to sustain traditional and cultural values by oral means in this situation.

Modern Educational System and its impacts: 

People's minds are diverted by the present educational system and how it is seen. In today's world, knowledge is acquired through research and data collection. Oral materials collected by researchers in the subject of tradition may not be accurate. Oral tradition information is even changed during the printing process. Oral tradition's information, on the other hand, can be amended or even corrected. People are forced to accept information from printed pages that are full of inaccuracies and difficult to fix as part of the educational process. The availability of publicly available information on cultures and values provides a challenge in passing down cultures and values from generation to generation through oral transmission.

Source of information and way of perceiving and sharing it: 

Oral tradition is entirely reliant on oral communication. As a literary tradition, it lacks any written records. The information provided by the speakers is occasionally delivered incorrectly. The information is occasionally misunderstood by the listeners. Due to the generational divide, the accuracy of the elders' historical information may be misinterpreted by the listeners. It becomes very difficult to legitimize oral tradition or traditional stories in this situation. The speakers and listeners must have a clear knowledge of each other. The audience must have faith in what they are hearing. The way we perceive and convey information must be designed with our traditions and elders in mind.

The relevance of our culture and the values of our tradition, as well as their preservation, are discussed in this article. This article has mostly concentrated on the overarching concept of passing down tradition from generation to generation through oral means in order to ensure the world's and people's bright futures. The duty of sharing heritage is crucial, and both elders and young people play critical responsibilities in preserving our tradition's norms, values, and traditions. Generations must continue to bear responsibility for the preservation of our culture and traditional values.

The transmission of information from one generation to the next by oral means must be genuine. Listening to our elders is critical for understanding the true value of our tradition. The elders are the guardians and keepers of our culture because of their ideal positions in society. Following them, it will be difficult to fill their seats. Young people must demonstrate an interest in their culture and the words of their elders. They must respect their elders and pass on information to the next generation in order to preserve our culture. The process of passing down tradition appears to be more difficult than anticipated at the moment.

Oral traditions are an art form in which elders pass on their cultural and value notions to young people through oral techniques, as has already been mentioned. It's a tool for teaching students about the natural world. The elders' and young people's roles are critical in oral tradition. The thoughts of elders are immortal if they are followed and correctly communicated by responsible young people.

LaPena emphasises our traditional and cultural values which are very much important for our bright future. According to him, we must listen to our elders to maintain our cultural and traditional norms and values.

LaPena reflects on the issue of passing on culture and values from generation to generation in oral form. Oral tradition refers to a form of human communication wherein knowledge, art, ideas and cultural value is received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another. This transmission is made possible through different sources like speech, song, folktales, chants, verses, prose, myths, festivals, rituals, etc. Throughout this essay, LaPena highly admires oral tradition because the major importance of oral tradition is related to the conservation of culture and tradition across generations and time. For the preservation and passing of the oral tradition, he finds both the elder people (old generation) and young people (new generation) equally responsible. The elder people are transmitting the knowledge and young people are willing to receive it. LaPena warns if knowledge about culture, tradition, and custom is not passed on it is likely to disappear in the course of time. Because the culture and values of tradition should be nurtured and protected from generation to generation for the benefit of people and their life; cultural and traditional values play a very important role in people's lives.

The essay begins with LaPena’s narration of what inspired him to meditate on the issue of oral tradition. The observation of the death of the elders and a realisation of the difficulty to maintain the tradition evoked the writer’s thoughts on the oral tradition. He defines oral tradition as an art form that passes from generation to generation orally. When the elders pass away, their knowledge, information and idea are to be carried forward by the new generation but it is not that easy and simple in the context of today’s world.

LaPena in detail discusses the obstacles on the way of maintaining the oral tradition. In this regard, he outlines four major problems. The first problem is the inability of the young people (new generation) to fill the ‘niche’ created by the elder people. In fact, when elders pass away, their knowledge of culture and responsibilities have to be assumed by the other individuals. But the problem is young people don’t pay much attention to the culture, tradition and custom shared by the elders when the elders are alive. As a result, the new generation cannot fulfil this responsibility sincerely.

Likewise, the emergence of new technology is the second obstacle with regard to maintaining the oral tradition. The young people are so lost in the new technology that they have no time to listen to their elders. LaPena is critical of new technology as it leads to the disappearance of the oral tradition. He states that in the modern world driven by technology, it is hard to maintain tradition. Similarly, the modern education system is another hindrance to the way of oral tradition. The ‘educated’ researcher conducts the study on tradition but there is always the danger of manipulating the truth and reality of the tradition as the research is likely to be guided by the interest of the research. So, the modern education system provides not the true information but a bundle of wrong information. The fourth obstacle for oral tradition is the possible misrepresentation of the oral tradition. As the oral tradition is based on oral means, the information of the elders is likely to be perceived mistakenly by the young people thereby leading to the misrepresentation of the tradition, custom and culture.

LaPena also shows the difference between an oral tradition and a literary tradition. A literary tradition refers to both written and printed traditions in which information is transmitted through written form. According to him, mistakes can be modified and corrected in the oral tradition but it is not possible in the literary tradition. He finally concludes the essay by establishing a relationship between art and oral tradition. The oral tradition offers the artistic imagination to the artist shaping his view on how to visualise the stories, the characters, the designs and colour for art, the atmosphere etc.