As the debate over national education standards continues, some scholars are raising important questions about what the standards should do. A provocative look at the problems the standards might cause is Stephen Arons' Short Route to Chaos: Conscience, Community, and the Re-Constitution of American Schooling (University of Massachusetts Press, $40, 154 pages).

Mr. Arons, a legal scholar at the University of Massachusetts, is best known as a leading liberal supporter of school choice. His latest book shows him to be a formidable foe of efforts to centralize control of education either in state capitals or in Washington. In his view, the reason debates over textbooks, standards, religion and values in the classroom have become so vicious is that public schools operate by majoritarian principles, according to which winners get to dictate policy for a state or the nation and the losers either have to keep silent or pay for private schools.

The centerpiece of Mr. Arons' book is his critique of the Goals 2000 program, which he believes will result in "a substantial increase of power of government - at the state as well as the federal level - over the education of
individuals." The author contends that should Goals 2000 be implemented, schools will shift their curricula to satisfy national mandates, ensuring a bland but brutal uniformity in what's taught in our classrooms.

Mr. Arons' criticisms of Goals 2000 are overstated. It's clear that there is at least as much sentiment in favor of decentralization in schools as there is for more consolidation. For example, scholar Edward Pauly argues that most of the time, teachers ignore mandates from above and teach the best way they can, regardless of what is prescribed by school headquarters or Washington. Moreover, given the limited influence that the Department of Education has had on public schools, it's probable that Goals 2000 will not result in any major change in schooling; educators will just muddle along as they always have.

Nonetheless, Mr. Arons is a provocative and unpredictable writer, and this is an important book.

One of the many harmful legacies of the 1960s was that schools shifted from teaching right and wrong to teaching the more legalistic view that students should refrain from certain actions, not because they were wrong, but because they broke the law. This turned teachers from moral exemplars into regulators, and caused many students to feel free to commit acts that are immoral but not illegal.

Can anything be done to ensure that children follow the right path? A very interesting approach to teaching morality is provided by William Damon in The Youth Charter: How Communities Can Work Together to Raise Standards for All Our Children (Free Press, $24, 238 pages).

Mr. Damon, a Stanford education professor, proposes that concerned adults - parents, educators, police, coaches, scoutmasters, priests, ministers, rabbis - get together to discuss what sort of moral standards should be used to guide a community's children.

This discussion, the writer emphatically argues, should not have the force of law. It should not be a conversation where school board members or politicians make rules and parents protest. Nor does he argue that parents
should be forced to interfere in the lives of young people to whom they are not related. Rather, everyone is to be on an equal footing, and the discussion is designed to help make sure that adults in a city or town don't provide
contradictory advice to teenagers.

The "youth charter" that is produced is to be used as a guide for adults to set limits on children's behavior, while also providing a forum for adults to "exchange ideas and support with other adults who are also concerned with the future prospects of children."

Youth charters have only been implemented in a few cities, and the sample charter Damon provides, from Wellesley, Mass., is not inspiring. But it's clear that having parents and community leaders help each other is a much more promising notion than either continued isolation or increased regulation. As such, the book promotes an interesting new idea which communities should consider.

People who are seriously interested in reforming our schools ought to study history. Unfortunately, education historians, like so many contemporary historians, are far more interested in studying arcane parts of the past than in providing books that would really help concerned citizens understand the problems of our schools. Consider David F. Labaree's How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education (Yale University Press, $35, 262 pages).

Mr. Labaree, a Michigan State education professor, has collected papers that originally appeared in professional journals in the late 1980s and 1990s. Some of these papers are quite good. For example, one paper shows how two foundations created by Andrew Carnegie did a great deal in the first half of this century to ensure that public schools in Seattle didn't differ much from those in Schenectady. Another interesting paper discusses the reasons why education schools have become little-respected institutions with low standards.

But most of the book will not interest the general reader. Several of the chapters critique some of the doom-laden reports about the schools that were commonplace in the 1980s. But it's now clear that these reports, deemed significant at the time, are of little interest to anyone. Moreover, Mr. Labaree has stitched his chapters into a book with an unconvincing central thesis: that schools have become so obsessed with credentials and training students for the world of work that they have forgotten what education is all about. But the author's jargon-laden initial chapter will not convince his fellow education researchers and will bore the general public.

Martin Morse Wooster is an associate editor of The American Enterprise and the author of "Angry Classrooms, Vacant Minds."