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66 Ark. Const. of 1868, art. IX, § 1, reprinted in Ark. Code Ann. Constitutions, at 567.

Following reconstruction, the 1874 Constitution contained the following clause: Intelligence and virtue being the safeguards of liberty and the bulwark of a free and good government, the State shall ever maintain a general, suitable, and efficient system of free schools whereby all persons in the State between the ages of six and twenty-one years may receive gratuitous instruction. Ark. Const. of 1874, art. 14, § 1. After Amendment 53 was adopted in 1968, we have the Education Article as we know it today.

[7] That education has been of paramount concern to the citizens of this state since the state's inception is beyond dispute. It is safe to say that no program of state government takes precedence over it. In 1983, this court emphasized that "&#160;[e]ducation becomes the essential prerequisite that allows our citizens to be able to appreciate, claim and effectively realize their established rights." ''DuPree v. Alma Sch. Dist. No. 30'', 279 Ark. at 346, 651 S.W.2d at 93. We further said in DuPree that "we believe the right to equal educational opportunity is basic to our society." Id. However, we shied away in DuPree from proclaiming education to be a fundamental right of each school child under the Education Article of our constitution. Indeed, the DuPree decision primarily dealt with the disparity in equal educational opportunity caused by the school-funding system and not with whether the system was inadequate under the Education Article.

d. Constitutional Duty
[8] Our constitutional history underscores the point that education has always been of supreme importance to the people of this state. The General Assembly recognized this in 1997, when it acknowledged that the state is constitutionally required to provide a general, suitable, and efficient system of free public schools, and that the Arkansas courts have held that obligation to be a "paramount duty." See Act 1307 of 1997, § 1 (d)(1-2), codified at Ark. Code Ann. § 6-20-302(d)(1-2) (Repl. 1999). There is no