What a week at Oxford taught me about character formation

Teaching has gone on in Oxford for nine centuries, and it has never confined itself to what a person knows; it has always cared what a person becomes. In the first week of September I went back to my old university and became a student there again, for five days of Leadership and Character Training, the programme the Oxford Character Project has built on a decade of research. I did not go there to be persuaded. I had already argued in these pages that education without character cannot build a nation, and that taleem and tarbiyat must be held together rather than one of them left to chance. I went for something narrower: to find out whether character can be formed on purpose in the young men and women who pass through our universities, and if so, how. I came back with more than I went for. Pakistan has spent decades repairing its institutions by changing rules, structures and faces, and almost never by changing what they form in those who pass through them. Our universities gather a whole generation at the ripe young age when it can still be shaped: if character can be formed on purpose, our campuses offer the most powerful instrument of human development. "Character" reaches us from the Greek charakter, meaning the mark stamped on a coin. The worth of a coin lies not in the metal but in the imprint; an imprint is not made in one stroke: it is pressed in by the same pressure in the same place, again and again. That is how character is formed: by habit, by reflection on yesterday, by small daily efforts nobody applauds. Aristotle said it plainly: we become just by doing just acts, and brave by doing brave acts. Character is not announced. It is pressed in. We confuse it with two other things. The first is personality: what we naturally are, the introvert and the extrovert, the cautious and the quick. It is largely given, and it earns us no credit. The second is values: the beliefs and principles we say matter most. Every organisation in Pakistan has them framed in the reception area, and every university a vision and mission statement to match. They are shallow unless something inside the institution firms up the character they describe. A value statement is an announcement; character is the set of settled habits, formed by repeated practice, that shape how a person thinks, feels and acts. A value is tested only when holding to it costs you something: money, a promotion, a friendship, or simply your comfort. A value that has never been paid for is only an opinion. Take merit, which every university in Pakistan claims: it means nothing until the day a powerful man's son is turned down. That day the value is either paid for, or exposed; nobody was ever made honest by a powerful poster of values. Pay that price once and you have done a good thing. Pay it often enough and it stops being a struggle: what began as a decision becomes second nature. Believing that truthfulness matters is a value. Telling the truth when it costs you, and then telling it again the following week, is character. Then comes the idea that changed how I see my colleagues and myself. We think of virtue and vice as a pair: honesty against dishonesty, courage against cowardice, one good against one bad. Aristotle taught otherwise: every virtue is a middle point between two faults, deficiency and excess. He is careful to add that the middle is not a fixed midpoint; it is the right amount for the situation, and finding it takes judgement. The Oxford Character Project has made that old idea usable, naming for each strength the fault of too little and of too much. Courage is the middle point between timidity and recklessness. Too little is the colleague who will not say the uncomfortable fact in a meeting, and who blocks a good idea because it is not his own. Too much is the leader who gambles his institution's reputation, because caution looks weak. Humility sits between putting yourself first and putting yourself down. Too little is the professor whose name appears on papers he never read, and the student who asks a question in every class to be noticed; too much is the student who knows the answer and never raises her hand. None of this is foreign to us; our own sources say it with greater force. The Quran calls the believers ummatan wasatan, a community of the middle way (Surah al-Baqarah, 2:143). It tells the believer neither to keep his hand chained to his neck nor to open it as wide as it will go (Surah Bani Israil, 17:29): miserliness and extravagance are both faults; the virtue is the measured middle. And we have the exemplar. Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said he was sent for one purpose: to perfect good character. Long before the first revelation, the people of Makkah called him al-Sadiq and al-Ameen, the truthful and the trustworthy. Those names were earned in ordinary dealings repeated over many years. Character was established first; authority followed. That leaves the harder question: can such habits be formed on purpose, in a crowded university, among young people already shaped by family and social media? The Oxford Character Project's answer is not sermons but a method: seven ways in which character is built, among them habituation, reflection, exemplars, the words we use, and friendships that hold us to account. That method, and what it would ask of a Pakistani university, is for a second article. Nations are not built by people who hold the right values. They are built by people whose character holds when it costs them something.