"Virtues" is no reward, page 2 Each half-hour episode of "The Book of Virtues" (PBS is previewing two episodes per night, from September 2-4) illustrates a single virtue, like honesty or courage, through stories from Greek mythology, the Bible or European, African and Native American folklore. (The series will begin airing regularly in the winter.) The show's hero and heroine, 11-year-old white boy Zach and 10-year-old Native American girl Annie, fall (gently) off the straight and narrow and are guided back to goodness by their lovable, storytelling animal friends: Plato, a fatherly buffalo who sort of sounds like James Earl Jones in "The Lion King," but isn't James Earl Jones; Aristotle, a bookish prairie dog; Socrates, an antic bobcat who sort of sounds like Nathan Lane in "The Lion King," but isn't Nathan Lane; and Aurora, a wise hawk. "Honesty" is represented by such stories as "The Frog Prince" (the Princess is played by Paige O'Hara, Belle in Disney's "Beauty and the Beast"), "George Washington and the Cherry Tree" and "The Indian Cinderella" (voiced by Irene Bedard, Disney's Pocahontas). "Courage" features Mark "Luke Skywalker" Hamill as Theseus in the story of the Minotaur, and Ed Begley, Jr. as William Tell. Both "Courage" segments have the vaguely sadistic tone of those Bible cartoons that local stations used to run on Sunday mornings -- you know, true believers prepare calmly to face a grisly end. A homogenized, watered-down approximation of the kind of action cartoons ("Batman," "Gargoyles") that kids really like, "the Book of Virtues" is sanitized pop culture in the grand tradition of Pat Boone and Christian rock. Look, it's not that "The Book of Virtues" (or the Flanders Way) is without merit. Like Bennett's book, the show is chock full of important lessons worth learning. The problem with Bennett's approach is that (a) it's boring, and (b) it's smugly superior. In his introduction to the book, Bennett makes magnanimously inclusive statements like "Good people... can be conservative, and good people can be liberal," and "The vast majority of Americans share a respect for certain fundamental traits of character: honesty, compassion, courage and perseverence." But if Bennett truly believed that the "vast majority" of Americans are moral individuals who are passing on the fundamental virtues to their children, there would have been no reason for writing his book. Who are the morally vacant families he's taken it upon himself to instruct, then? Surely not the families in the conservative Christian circles he and fellow Empower America co-director Jack Kemp travel in -- they're already saved. So he must mean someone else's family. Like yours, and mine. Bennett's contempt-disguised-as-concern for society's virtueless, bad apple (and non-white?) kids -- and, presumably, the liberals, working mothers, public school teachers and social workers who produced them -- wafts off the page. We are all failures as parents, Americans, humans, and we need Bennett to tell us the difference between right and wrong. If this were an old B movie, Bennett would be the missionary who ends up in the stew pot. In press material for the show, Bennett says, "The way to respond to poor television programming is two things, turn it off or try to put something good on. And what we've tried here is to put something good on." Which makes it sound as if "The Book of Virtues" exists in a vacuum. There are many shows that teach virtues and "moral literacy" (although not in quite so castor oil-y a fashion) and that have been doing so for years. Indeed, most of these shows are on PBS -- and shame on public broadcasting, which should have shouted the merits of its programming from the rooftops instead of caving in to the family values bullies by running Bennett's agenda-laden series. You want virtues? Mister Rogers has been teaching virtues for 25 years (his "I Can Stop if I Want To" song is a perfect introduction to the virtue of self-discipline), and he's the least pushy, most compassionate moral educator children's TV has ever known. A newer PBS offering, "Puzzle Place," shows how kids (well, puppets) of different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds can celebrate their differences and similarities; it teaches virtues like friendship, responsibility and honesty, and it does so with humor, something sorely lacking in "The Book of Virtues." "Shining Time Station" (PBS by way of Canadian TV) gets across moral lessons in some of the wittiest kids-show writing around (and if it's old-fashioned Church of England homilies you want, "Shining Time Station" is also the TV home of the "Thomas the Tank Engine" stories, written by the good Rev. W. Awdry). And many parents of balky older children swear by ABC's family sitcom "Home Improvement" as a way to open discussions about issues of right and wrong. While "The Book of Virtues," both book and TV series, hands down tedious moral superiority from a pulpit, Fred Rogers and other paragons of children's programming place themselves, both physically and metaphorically, at a kid's eye level. Bennett doesn't include it as one of his book's 10 chapter headings, but respect for others is a virtue, too.

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