Parenting & Family Quote by William Bennett

Moral education, Bennett argues, is less a curriculum than a courtroom drama: kids are always watching, always collecting evidence. The line works because it refuses the comforting fantasy that values can be outsourced to schools, churches, or after-school programs while adults live by a separate, more convenient code. Its blunt repetition of "take morality seriously" is not clumsy; it is prosecutorial. He is trying to close the loophole between what adults preach and what they permit themselves to do.

The subtext is an accusation disguised as advice. "In the presence of adults" frames morality as a social performance with consequences: children learn what a community actually punishes, excuses, or quietly rewards. Bennett doubles down on "with their own eyes" to privilege conduct over rhetoric, implying that lectures are mostly noise when they collide with hypocrisy. This is a politics of example, not explanation.

Context matters. Bennett rose to prominence during late-20th-century "values" politics, when anxieties about crime, drugs, family breakdown, and cultural permissiveness were being translated into policy language and electoral identity. In that climate, insisting on adult moral seriousness does two jobs at once: it reinforces personal responsibility as the remedy for social disorder, and it shifts the burden from systemic causes to household and community behavior.

There is also a strategic elegance here. By making adult integrity the precondition for children's morality, Bennett sets a high bar that flatters no one and indicts everyone. It's a call for consistency, but also a demand for authority: if adults want to lead, they must live in a way that can withstand a child's unblinking cross-examination.