Parenting & Family Quote by William Bennett

“Common” does a lot of quiet work here. Bennett frames English not simply as a practical tool but as the binding agent of national belonging, then turns that premise into a moral obligation: adults have a “task” to make children conform linguistically. The sentence structure is instructive. First, a declaration that sounds like a neutral fact (“Our common language is English”). Then, a pivot into duty (“And our common task is...”), as if disagreement would be a rejection of communal responsibility itself.

The intent is assimilationist, but it’s packaged as civic common sense. By defining English as the shared baseline, Bennett positions non-English languages as deviations to be corrected, not assets to be cultivated. “Non-English-speaking children” is also telling: the kids are marked as a problem category, and the solution is singular. There’s no nod to bilingualism, translation, or institutional adaptation; the burden is placed on the child to catch up to the country, not on the country to accommodate its own diversity.

Context matters. Bennett’s political career peaked during late-20th-century culture-war debates about schools, immigration, “values,” and national identity. The quote sits comfortably in that era’s rhetoric: anxiety about demographic change translated into policy language about standards and unity. The subtext is less about grammar than about gatekeeping. English becomes a proxy for Americanness, and “common task” recruits the listener into enforcement, casting language learning as a test of loyalty rather than a complex educational challenge shaped by funding, pedagogy, and family circumstance.