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........

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