Tema, July 10, GNA - Mrs Lucy Kwapong, Tema Municipal Director of Education, has stressed the need to maintain cultural practices that promote discipline.

Speaking at the tenth basic schools' inter-zonal cultural festival at Tema, she said the concept of sin help to promote good moral behaviour and enforce discipline.

"People refrain from anti-social practice such as stealing, murder, incest, rape, parental neglect, adultery, littering, environmental and water pollution because of the wrath of the spirit powers and it helped to create a peaceful and harmonious society thus creating a discipline society".

The theme for the festival was "culture, bedrock for discipline in our society".

She said practices such as offering of sacrifice, rites of passage like birth, puberty, marriage and death and reincarnation among others help in enforcing morality.

Mrs Kwapong said if our society can maintain and respect aspects of our culture, which are not dehumanising and inculcate in the youth, the spirit of cultural heritage the moral decadence that has eaten so much into the society would be a thing of the past.

"The infiltration of foreign cultures that end up alienating our gullible youth from our society would cease and we shall live in a society that is disciplined personified".

She said in the past all forms of indiscipline were regarded as sin in our society because it was frowned upon with penalties against those who exhibited those acts of indiscipline.

For instance, in Ghana and other West African societies, sin is classified into private, public, ritual and moral.

She regretted that, modernisation; urbanisation and the influx of foreign cultures have "made us to abandon some aspects of our culture, which hitherto were the solid foundation, on which discipline of society rested".