BOOK REVIEW : Where Moral Education Fails : WHY JOHNNY CAN’T TELL RIGHT FROM WRONG; Moral Illiteracy and the Case for Character Education <i> by William Kilpatrick</i> ; Simon & Schuster; $23.00; 365 pages

The bogeyman who haunts the dreams of William Kilpatrick, author of “Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong,” is a high school teacher in California who conducts a class in what used to be called sex education but is now known as “social living.”

“I try to support everyone’s value system,” the teacher explains. “So I say, ‘If you’re a virgin, fine. If you’re sexually active, fine. If you’re gay, fine.’ ” And the teacher’s advice on moral behavior is strictly a matter of technique: “Just say ‘No,’ . . . if you can’t say, ‘No,’ then use a condom.”

According to Kilpatrick, a professor at Boston University, just about everything that’s wrong with moral education in America can be discerned in the “moral weightlessness” of the teacher’s message to her charges.

As a result of her “Toys ‘R’ Us approach to education,” Kilpatrick insists, our children and our very culture have been sapped of “both moral context and moral energy.”

Public education in America, Kilpatrick complains, operates under “a de facto policy of withholding from children the greatest incentive to moral behavior--namely, the conviction that life makes sense--a policy of doing everything possible to prevent them from learning the larger purposes . . . that give meaning to existence.”

Kilpatrick specifically condemns what he calls “a failed philosophy of moral education,” as embodied in the curricula variously known as “decision making,” “critical thinking,” “values clarification” or “the dilemma method.”

A traditionalist in the most profound sense of the word, Kilpatrick prefers what he calls “character education,” a method of moral instruction “based on the idea that there are traits of character children ought to know, that they learn these by example and that once they know them, they need to practice them until they become second nature.”

The author stoutly argues that the task of education, both at home and in the schools, is the teaching of “moral literacy” based upon “a common moral culture” and “a tradition of shared ideals and civilized habits.”

He maintains that such a tradition remains intact and accessible in our fractured and stressed-out civilization, and he insists on setting the very highest standards of moral behavior even if some of our children will fall short.

“Actual behavior tends to fall below the cultural ideal,” he concedes. “What this means in practice . . . is that the higher the cultural standard is set, the farther actual behavior rises to meet it.”

Kilpatrick knows where to find all the hot buttons of political incorrectitude, and he takes a certain perverse joy in punching them hard.

For example, he condemns what he calls “feminist moral educators” and characterizes their beliefs as “an esoteric mix of Nietzschean philosophy, Marxist social analysis and even mystery cult religions.”

But Kilpatrick himself seems to belong to the cult of Mars: “What the military has that so many schools do not is an ethos of pride, loyalty and discipline,” he proclaims. “Schools can learn a lot from the Army.”

At times, Kirkpatrick embraces the inflammatory rhetoric of Patrick Buchanan, as when he adopts a martial metaphor to describe the use of media in the battle for the hearts and minds of American youth.

“The arts are a two-edged sword, but sometimes a sword is what is needed,” Kilpatrick argues. “If, for example, the struggle to overcome a drug addiction is in part a spiritual battle with evil . . . then it might be important to look at forms of moral education that would equip our young accordingly. If one has to do battle in life, one needs to be trained to do battle.”

The most intriguing element of Kilpatrick’s book--and the most surprising--is his emphasis on literature as the font of moral values and the tool of moral instruction.

He argues, accurately enough, that “the entertainment industry . . . has, in effect, become the real moral educator of the young,” and he observes that something as simple as reading aloud to our children from the great books may turn out to be the most effective form of moral instruction.

“One important step that any parent can take to restore family culture, to improve family relationships and to take moral education out of the hands of ‘somebody in Los Angeles,’ ” he writes, “is to revive the practice of family reading.”

Faced with all the afflictions of our troubled era--violence, drug abuse, sexually transmitted disease, homelessness and joblessness, the disintegration of the family--the smug moral prescriptions of “Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong” may strike some readers as rigid, simplistic and even dangerous.

But the essential message of Kilpatrick’s book goes beyond stern moralism and taps into something deep and powerful in human nature.

“Conceived of as rule keeping or as refraining from wrongdoing, morality never works for long,” Kilpatrick concedes.

What makes the notion of morality come alive is the connection between the human being and the rich legacy of his or her civilization.

“Morality, religion, story and myth are bound together in some vital way,” Kilpatrick writes, and he suggests that the quest for moral direction in a benighted world begins with the opening of a book.

“Morality needs to be set within a storied vision if it is to remain morality,” he concludes.

“When the narrative sense is absent from individual lives, society also suffers an impoverishment. Both for society and the individual, the loss of story and history amounts to a loss of memory. We become like amnesiacs, not knowing where we are going because we don’t know where we have come from.”