Character Makes a Difference

This week we are starting the Sophomore “Make a Difference” project where each year students learn about those individuals who have truly made a difference by how they lived. This project increases students’ familiarity with database and bibliographic tools while expanding their knowledge of over 60 social activists such as Cesar Chavez, Shirin Ebadi, and Nelson Mandela. Having been working with the Sophomore students, my reading has been focused on relevant examples, particularly these two new books: The Barefoot Lawyer by Chen Guangcheng and The Road to Character by David Brooks.

The Barefoot Lawyer by Chen Guangcheng 

Who can forget the international headlines during May, 2012 when Chen Guangcheng finally arrived at the US Embassy in Beijing and was later released with his family to the West? I cannot begin to imagine the difficulties which this blind self-taught lawyer bravely faced throughout his life in China and later as he has tried to acclimate to the US.  This book describes the grueling poverty of his youth, his growing activism in opposition to China’s One Child Policy, subsequent arrest, imprisonment and eventual escape.  

The Barefoot Lawyer contains sixteen pages of images and a short foreword by the Dalai Lama which also mentions Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner currently incarcerated in China and one of the activists about whom our students are learning. Several others and some less well-known are included in this second book:

The Road to Character by David Brooks

This new title explores the differences between “résumé virtues” (wealth, fame, status) and “eulogy virtues” (like honesty, faithfulness, and kindness) which David Brooks also discussed in his recent New York Times essay, “The Moral Bucket List.” 

In The Road to Character, he profiles several individuals at length, including Frances Perkins, Ida Stover Eisenhower, Dorothy Day, George Marshall (of Marshall Plan fame), theologian Augustine of Hippo, writers George Eliot and Samuel Johnson. Overall, Brooks argues that each exhibits “a profound humility, which has best been defined as an intense self-awareness from a position of other-centeredness.” Brooks’ choices are purposefully from a time before  the Big Me, the age of self-esteem and status updates. Summarizing his argument -- and worth reading on its own -- is a numbered Humility Code, “a coherent image of what to live for and how to live.”

Brooks writes that “example is the best teacher” and admits how hard it is to learn how to be good, especially from classroom experience. Hopefully, we are taking a small step with our students in the Make a Difference project; some names students recognize, but many are totally new to them. Each provides an example of struggle and adversity, of defining an identity and responding to the important questions: What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do?