Aging & Wisdom Quote by William Bennett

Bennett is drawing a bright line between teaching kids how to be good and teaching them what to think about the culture war. The sentence is built like a policy memo: “different task” and “prior task” sound neutral, almost bureaucratic, but the hierarchy is the point. He’s not merely distinguishing skills; he’s ranking them. Character first, controversy later. In a single move, he reframes debates about schooling away from contested content and toward formation, where authority can feel more natural and dissent can be dismissed as “premature.”

The subtext is a critique of education as public argument. “Great, difficult ethical controversies of the day” is deliberately grand and vague: it gestures at whatever issues are roiling the news without naming them, allowing listeners to fill in the blanks with the battles they already fear (sex, religion, patriotism, race, drugs). That vagueness is strategic. It turns the classroom into a potential site of moral contamination while positioning “character” as the safe, nonpartisan alternative.

Context matters: Bennett rose to national prominence as a conservative education voice in the 1980s and 1990s, when anxieties about permissiveness, declining standards, and “values” politics were peaking. This line carries that era’s conviction that schools should stabilize society, not interrogate it. The irony is that “character formation” is never neutral either; it smuggles in a moral canon under the banner of readiness. By insisting controversy must wait, Bennett doesn’t remove politics from education. He tries to decide which politics gets to arrive first.