Editor, Gazette-Journal:

I was helping out at a local Republican Party campaign booth recently and heard a range of complaints and comments about this and that. But there’s one complaint that’s repeated whenever folks my age are talking politics with folks who remember school as being somewhat different than what we read and hear these days from some parents and grandparents. 

“They don’t teach civics no more.”

If you’re unsure what “civics” is try this: the study of the rights and duties of citizenship. Three words in that definition may also need to be defined. Let me volunteer this: To study is to make a detailed investigation and analysis of a subject; Rights, even in today’s “heads I win, tails you lose” parlance should mean a moral or legal claim. And citizenship refers to a legally recognized inhabitant of a particular nation, or town. In Gloucester, we substitute county for town.

The complaint “The...