Right and wrong

The Book of Virtues

Compiled by William J. Bennett

Bookman Press

THE ENTHUSIASTIC reception which has greeted William J. Bennett's 832-page anthology of "great moral stories", essays and verse has surprised cynics and nihilists, but nobody else. Reviews and sales over the past year in America, and over the past three months in a special Australian edition, underline what many eminent educators have been saying for years: adults who care for the young are hungry for literature which upholds worthy principles, and which offers impressionable readers authentic role models.

For well over a decade, the material provided for school children on the related questions 'What is right and wrong?' and 'What is the good life?' has been woefully inadequate. As the US Secretary of Education, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities under President Reagan, and a well-known defender of perennial values, Bill Bennett would have been painfully aware of this situation. But, unlike many other public figures calling for better character formation in schools, he had the foresight to meet a pressing market demand before it could be fully articulated.

It would be churlish not to say 'At last!' in response to a volume whose stated purpose is to allow parents and teachers to browse at their leisure among writings which provide "anchors and moorings" for children within a common world of "shared ideals". And it would be ungenerous not to remark on the soundness and clarity of the editorial comments framing each of the ten virtues which are given "form and content" in the anthology. In his introductory statements, Bennett moves easily among ideas which have shaped lives in many parts of the world over hundreds of years.

At the start of Chapter 2, for example, he remarks that "just as courage takes its stand by others in challenging situations, so compassion takes its stand with others in their distress". To introduce the fifth chapter, he says that Work is not "what we do for a living but what we do with our living", and soon afterwards that Work's opposite is "not leisure or play or having fun but idleness". On Perseverance, early on, he quotes Harry Truman, who once observed that being a country's president "is like riding a tiger....