Putting Us Back on the Path to Virtue : Where have all our values gone? Maybe no one can answer that, but some are devoting themselves to rebuilding our national character.

Society is taking a nose-dive. Sixty-two percent of Americans said they thought so in a recent Gallup poll. That number is up from 46% just 10 years ago.

Reversing the decline of common decency has become a national cause of late, attracting some of the country’s most powerful people.

In Washington, Sen. Pete Domenici, actor Tom Selleck and others have proposed a National Character Counts Week, involving school programs to instill students with a sense of honesty, responsibility and respect, for October.

In California, Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Michael Huffington is campaigning on a platform of virtue. He wants citizens to volunteer for community service work, and he says that if elected, he will push for broader tax breaks for charitable donations.

And the Character Counts Coalition, formed last year by the Josephson Institute for Ethics in Marina del Rey, is working to teach core values to children. Members include Big Brothers/Big Sisters, the Urban League and the 4-H Club.

Across the country, others with less clout are putting their own simpler, smaller-scale ideas to work. For all of them, building character is like building muscles: The old-fashioned way still works best.

The program getting the most attention comes in book form: “The Book of Virtues, a Treasury of Great Moral Stories.” It is a collection of vintage myths, fairy tales, poems and political speeches that illustrate aspects of an excellent character. The Bible story of David and Goliath, for example, personifies courage, and two famous speeches exemplify perseverance--Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream.” The author, William Bennett, intends grown-ups to read the stories to children, teaching them such virtues as loyalty, hard work, compassion and respect.

That the book has spent 26 weeks on the bestseller list, with baby boomers as its best customers, doesn’t surprise Bennett, who served as Secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan and head of the George Bush Administration’s office of drug control policy.

“People think the country’s going to hell,” he says, ticking off a list of complaints: “Crime, family disintegration, social breakdown, sleaziness, general trashy behavior.” Although he and his “The Book of Virtues” have touched a nerve, critics say the book is a platform for future political ambitions.

“Bennett’s a Johnny-come-lately to all of this, who just puts a political twist on it,” says Ben Bycel, executive director of the Los Angeles Ethics Council. “Others have been working on value training for five or 10 years.”

Still, the book’s emphasis on a hot topic is calling new attention to nonpolitical character-building programs put into practice long before Bennett put his into words.

Nobody graduates from San Marcos High School, near Santa Barbara, until clocking at least 60 hours of community service. Principal Bob Ferguson compares it to the outdated tradition of Saturday morning chores. “Children are getting away from accepting responsibilities,” he says. “Community service can help there.”

The school’s 1,600 students may choose from among the options posted on a bulletin board by various community groups. The teen-agers have helped build a park and clean up beaches. One boy coached a school football team this year. “The kids called him coach, his self-esteem improved, his grades went up,” Ferguson says. Now the teen-ager wants to be a coach for a living.

Ferguson believes in teaching everyday ethics. Cleaning up your act is like cleaning the garage, he says. “Keep it simple. Too many plans are grandiose. ‘Where do I begin? I’ll begin in this corner.’ ”

The Rev. James O’Donohoe agrees. To help his students learn responsibility, the longtime college professor of ethics enforces a basic rule.

“No late papers. If they’re due March 25, that’s when students hand them in. If not, I don’t accept them,” he says. “We have to have a return to discipline.”

O’Donohoe, of Boston College, also lectures on medical and sexual ethics to people in the business world, and is about to launch an ethics-counseling program to be used by U.S. Navy chaplains.

Like Bennett, he favors a return to the fundamental virtues, an idea advocated by both Aristotle in the 1st Century and Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages. The basic plan is to build a society based on justice--Aquinas added another ingredient, love--emphasize individual character-building and put the good of the group ahead of individual desires. It is an honor system that depends on steady practice. And it is the opposite of the “me first” attitude that has prevailed for much of the past 20 years.

“The mood has been in favor of individualism and ‘what’s good for our side,’ ” O’Donohoe says. “It’s destroying us.”

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O’Donohoe and most other leaders in the trend back to virtue training believe the classroom is the most important launching pad. “The key problem is that we stopped teaching ethics in any formal way,” he says. “It became identified with religion and you don’t teach religion in public schools. But the separation of church and state doesn’t have to mean the separation of virtue and society.”

For those who didn’t learn moral standards in school, it’s not too late. Los Angeles Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Goul regularly teaches grown-ups the importance of honesty.

“A rape victim I was defending lied on the stand, but only I knew about it,” he says. “During the break I called her aside, talked to her, then called her back to the stand as my own witness. I asked her if she’d told the truth. She said ‘no.’ ”

Her public confession may have cost them the case. “Jurors are less likely to trust someone who lies about one thing on the stand,” Goul says. “The verdict came back with a hung jury.”

Still, he would do it again. As he sees it, one lie leads to another. “What the country faces, each of us faces day to day. We form the moral fiber of the country.”

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Cal Turner is determined to restore another fading practice, social responsibility.

As president of his family’s $900-million Dollar General retail business based in Nashville, Tenn., he offers a back-to-school deal for adults--free literacy training. In the four years since the company started the program, 27,000 adults have passed through it.

“We serve a low-income clientele and found an appalling level of cultural illiteracy among them,” Turner says. “We adopted literacy.”

Hoping to revive the spirit of social responsibility, he recently donated $4 million to the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University, his alma mater. The money is earmarked for a moral leadership program.

Dean Joseph Houff is overseeing the curriculum, which will train students to serve the public good through business, education and other fields. “People’s values are formed early, but they can change,” Houff says. “We want to help people think more clearly about the ethical good.”