As its title suggests, The Education Of Little Tree has a busy lesson plan in store for its target audience, but its refreshing depth and seriousness outclass the gross-out physical gags and phony moralizing that pass for children's entertainment these days. Writer-director Richard Friedenberg, who previously adapted A River Runs Through It, again taps nature in all its secular wisdom; traditional family values are disposed of in under 15 minutes, as a Cherokee orphan (Joseph Ashton) sets to running whiskey and cursing with his backwoods grandfather (James Cromwell). During the height of the Depression, the boy is sent away to the mountains of East Tennessee to live with Cromwell and his Native American wife (Tantoo Cardinal), an arrangement that's threatened by police and welfare agents. But Cromwell and Cardinal teach him about his heritage, and, in the film's most riveting scenes, his strength is tested as he's forced to attend an "Indian school" designed to eradicate the language and culture of its students. This is provocative stuff, for parents as well as their kids, and Friedenberg deserves credit for not souping up the material, even if that results in a few dull stretches. A solid cast helps, too: The wonderful Cromwell (Babe, L.A. Confidential) is an actor whose paternal authority keeps the film's gentle tone intact.