Justice & Law Quote by Carol Bellamy

“Here once again” does a lot of quiet persuasion. Bellamy isn’t merely praising school; she’s returning to a debate where education is always the proposed fix and often the first thing underfunded. The line carries the weary insistence of someone who has had to argue, repeatedly, that children don’t magically acquire agency. They’re taught it, or they’re denied it.

Her phrasing makes rights sound less like abstract entitlements and more like learned practice. “Aware of their rights” signals a gap: children may legally have protections, yet functionally lack access to them without literacy, civic knowledge, or the confidence to name what’s happening. The next clause tightens the frame: to “exercise them in a respectful manner.” That’s not moral decoration; it’s strategy. In institutions that routinely discipline kids for being “disruptive,” respectability becomes a survival skill, a way to make rights legible to adults who control consequences. The subtext is blunt: if children claim rights the “wrong” way, the system will treat their claim as misbehavior.

Bellamy’s context matters here. As an educator and child-advocacy figure (closely associated with UNICEF-era rights talk), she’s speaking from a world where “rights” language must coexist with schools, social services, and governments that prefer compliance. The sentence tries to reconcile a tension: empower children, but keep them within the boundaries adults find acceptable.

The final payoff - “shape their own future” - shifts education from test scores to self-determination. It’s a reframing of childhood not as preparation for citizenship, but as citizenship already underway.