Tradition, Schooling, and the Prospects of Global Peace: A Critical Look

Abstract

How far would the star wars approach to understanding complex
global phenomenon take us in the creation of sustainable peace in
our fragile world? Does physical victory over a defined terrorist group
necessarily lead to a total victory over terrorism? Is global security
best served through taking a diversified set of actions? What
institution(s) could be made in the service of creating sustainable
global peace? These are big questions whose answers need to be
informed by scholarly work from a variety of academic disciplines.
This short article utilizes a change-continuity tension model to
understand the tension between transformation and continuity in
traditions that led to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Reflecting on the tradition-change dialectic, McLaren (1996) writes
that ... the best way to honor the accomplishments of a tradition is not
to canonize but to reinvent it. Throughout human history, traditions
and the institutions that hold them and pass them on to successive
generations have played adaptive community functions. To the extent
that traditions and the institutions that perpetuate them play such
functions, they are revolutionary. The need for changing such
traditions and institutions arises when they outgrow such functions.
Ideas and actions that contribute for the protection and sustenance of
the sociological unit form dominant traditions. Such traditions
generate energy for the propagation of the social unit. Social
cohesion, which is the prime mover of continuity within a matrix of
social history, is maintained as a consequence. Conversely, aged
traditions that play destructive roles in the life of the social entity get
selected and thrown out into the dustbins of history. When traditions
cease to render adaptive functions, change becomes imminent.