John Tobin lives in Concord. He was one of the attorneys representing school districts, parents, students, and taxpayers in the Claremont school funding case.
In his recent Monitor My Turn about public education, Ian Underwood, a Croydon selectmen, demonstrated that he doesn’t understand or accept the core principles of the NH Constitution.
He minimized and distorted the Constitution’s explicit commitment to public schools and their vital roles in preserving democracy and enabling our children to develop the skills they will need to prosper socially and economically as adults.
In recent years, self-styled “constitutionalists” and Free-Staters have tried to persuade the people of our state that our Constitution embodies a fierce libertarian and anti-government perspective.
This interpretation, they say, legitimizes their contention that many state and local government institutions on which New Hampshire citizens have long relied, including public schools, should be drastically weakened and diminished, if not abolished.
However, if one takes a few minutes to read the Constitution’s first twelve articles (most of them are very short) one will quickly see that its overarching principle is that our government is a “social contract,” with all of us as citizens having mutual rights and shared responsibilities.
This core vision was explicitly adopted in Part I, Articles 1 (government is “instituted for the common good”) and 3 (When men enter into a state of society, they surrender up some of their natural rights to that society, in order to ensure the protection of others…”)
In attempting to discredit public education and narrow its scope, the libertarians’ ultimate goal is to drastically reduce taxes. But the Founders understood that a shared commitment to pay reasonable taxes is a key component of the social contract.
Instead of describing taxes as an odious burden to be avoided at all costs, they said in Article 12 that each of us has a reciprocal relationship to our government that includes both benefits and responsibilities: “Every member of the community has a right to be protected by it, in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property; he is therefore bound to contribute his share in the expense of such protection, and to yield his personal service when necessary.”
As the famous Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society.”
The NH Constitution has also always included, in Part 2, Article 83, a unique affirmative obligation on our state government to educate the children of New Hampshire. This constitutional provision was the basis for the Claremont rulings that reaffirmed the State’s responsibility for education and held that the taxes used to pay for this education must be uniform in rate across the state.
In the Claremont II decision, the Court described the central role of public education in our economy and democracy: “Our society places tremendous value on education. Education provides the key to individual opportunities for social and economic advancement and forms the foundation for our democratic institutions and our place in the global economy.” Referring to the language of Part 2, Article 83, the Court pointed out that “The very existence of government was declared by the framers to depend upon the intelligence of its citizens.”
The Supreme Court was both visionary and practical in spelling out the scope of the education that our children need to succeed in the modern world:
“A constitutionally adequate public education is not a static concept removed from the demands of an evolving world. It is not the needs of the few but the critical requirements of the many that it must address. Mere competence in the basics — reading, writing, and arithmetic — is insufficient in the waning days of the twentieth century to insure that this State’s public school students are fully integrated into the world around them. A broad exposure to the social, economic, scientific, technological, and political realities of today’s society is essential for our students to compete, contribute, and flourish in the twenty-first century.”
In the aftermath of the painful experiment with remote learning during the pandemic, very few, if any, parents, or students, think that having children try to learn in isolation on a computer screen is an acceptable substitute for learning about a broad range of subjects in a classroom in a public school, with trained and qualified teachers guiding them, in the company of their peers.
Our Constitution wisely envisions a comprehensive and adaptable public education system that gives our children the tools and values to succeed in their individual lives while imbuing in each generation the knowledge and motivation to preserve and enhance our democracy. Let’s renew our commitment to this common cause.