Require more school

Our grandparents got a sixthgrade education. They learned to read, write and do arithmetic. Most jobs did not require much learning. My grandpa, Frank DuVall, born in 1885, lived in Huttig. He read the Arkansas Gazette and listened to the radio for his news, but he clearly preferred reading.

On Sundays, after Sunday school, church and dinner, Mother and Dad read the Gazette in the living room while my older brother, Mike, read the funnies to me on the kitchen floor. He was just learning to read and every other word was “something,” but I could make out the story from the pictures.

We didn’t have a TV or a record player, or a working radio, or even a telephone, and reading was our only entertainment. Sometimes, after supper, Mother and Dad would read to us from books they checked out at the town’s small library, and we talked a lot more than people do today.

Such was life in small-town America in the 1940s. We had time to think. We knew there was a war on. Three of my uncles went off to war—two came back.

People today are so distracted by TV, cellphones, computers, etc.; when do they have a chance to think? We don’t show much common sense. Our grandparents’ generation did not have a lot of formal education, but they listened to doctors and not to hucksters, and they elected intelligent leaders. They won the war and established the United Nations so that we would never again have to fight one. They created the Federal Reserve Bank to control the currency and maximize employment, and gave us the Declaration of Human Rights. Our parents graduated from high school and became our greatest generation. It is time to require four more years of public education so that we will know whom to trust.

RUUD DuVALL

Fayetteville