A Citizen’s Call to Reclaim the Bill of Rights and Local Control of Schools
For thirty-two years, New Hampshire has lived under a judicial decree that most citizens have never heard of, yet it reaches into every wallet and every classroom in the state.
In 1993 and 1997, in a pair of rulings known as Claremont I and Claremont II, the New Hampshire Supreme Court declared that the State of New Hampshire has a constitutional duty to define, provide, and pay for a uniform “adequate” education for every child — and that the Court itself would decide what “adequate” means and how much the legislature must tax us to pay for it.
That sounds reasonable to many ears — until you read the actual New Hampshire Constitution of 1784, still in force today, and discover that almost every sentence of the Claremont decisions collides head-on with the plain words of our Bill of Rights.
This is not a debate about whether children should be educated.
It is a debate about who gets to decide what education is, who pays for it, and whether five justices can rewrite the Constitution without asking the people.
The Constitution Has Two Parts — and Claremont Stood Them on Their Head
In 1882, in a case called Wooster v. Plymouth, the New Hampshire Supreme Court explained the basic architecture of our Constitution with crystal clarity:
- Part I is the Bill of Rights — a list of rights the people kept for themselves when they created the government. These rights are above the government, not granted by it.
- Part II is the Form of Government — a limited delegation of powers from the people to their agents in Concord.
The Claremont Court treated a single sentence in Part II (“Knowledge and learning … ought to be encouraged”) as a super-power that overrides everything the people reserved in Part I. That is exactly backwards.
Nine Unchanged Articles of the Bill of Rights That Claremont Ignored
Here, in plain English, is what our Bill of Rights actually says — and how Claremont violates every one of them:
- Article 1 – Government is founded on consent. No one ever voted to create a statewide education tax or to let judges run the schools.
- Article 2 – Parents have a natural right to direct the upbringing and education of their children. Claremont replaced parental judgment with judicial judgment.
- Article 5 – “No subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained … for worshipping God according to the dictates of his own conscience.” This is one of the strongest conscience clauses in America. In 1784, education was understood as moral and religious formation. Forcing parents to pay for curricula that contradict their deepest religious convictions on marriage, sexuality, gender, and the origins of life is the very definition of “molestation” of conscience.
- Article 12 – No one can be taxed except by laws to which they or their representatives have consented. Thousands of Granite Staters never consented to the taxes Claremont ordered.
- Article 14 – Justice must be obtained “freely, without being obliged to purchase it.” Under Claremont, only those who can afford years of litigation get to influence what “adequate” means.
- Article 15 – No one may be deprived of life, liberty, or property “but by the law of the land.” For 200 years the “law of the land” was local control of schools. Claremont replaced it with judicial decrees.
- Article 28 – No tax may be laid “without the consent of the people or their representatives.” The Court simply ordered the legislature to impose whatever tax was necessary — consent not required.
- Article 29 – Only the legislature may suspend laws. Claremont suspended centuries of local-school statutes by judicial fiat.
- Article 37 – Separation of powers. Claremont is the most sweeping judicial takeover of legislative and executive power in New Hampshire history: the Court defined the product, set the price, ordered the tax, and kept the case open for thirty years to enforce its commands.
The Original Article 6 — the Smoking Gun
When the Constitution was written, the very next article after the conscience clause (Article 5) authorized towns and religious societies — not the State — to hire and pay for teachers of “piety, religion and morality” at their own expense, with the exclusive right to choose their own teachers and no one compelled to pay for another sect’s teacher.
That was the framers’ vision of education: local, voluntary, parental, and inseparable from conscience.
Claremont erased it.
This Is Not Left vs. Right — It Is Liberty vs. Centralized Power
You do not have to be religious to see the danger.
If five justices can order the legislature to tax every citizen to pay for a state-defined curriculum today, they can order the same legislature to tax every citizen to pay for a state-defined health-care curriculum, climate curriculum, or political-reeducation curriculum tomorrow.
The New Hampshire Constitution was written precisely to prevent that kind of open-ended judicial rule.
What Must Be Done
- The next case that reaches the Supreme Court must force the Court to confront the nine articles it has ignored for three decades.
- Citizens, parents, and legislators must demand that the Claremont decisions be overruled in their entirety.
- Education must be returned to families, local communities, and voluntary association — encouraged by the State, but never controlled or compulsorily funded by it.
The New Hampshire Constitution still belongs to the people — not to five justices in black robes. It is time we reminded them.
Authors’ opinions are their own and may not represent those of Grok Media, LLC, GraniteGrok.com, its sponsors, readers, authors, or advertisers.
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