There is a persistent assumption built into how modern societies measure progress: that formal schooling, by exposing the mind to knowledge, produces moral sensitivity as a natural byproduct. This essay argues against that assumption.
Education and moral reasoning sit on different axes. One measures how much a person knows; the other measures how a person treats people unlike themselves — through empathy, the broader capacity from which conscience, moral courage, and a willingness to act against social cost all draw. Conflating education with this capacity has consequences. It lets institutions mistake credentialing for character-building, and it leaves societies unable to explain why educated people so often fail at exactly the empathy their education was supposed to cultivate.
The thesis here is specific: empathy and its downstream expressions — conscience, moral courage, ethical conviction held under pressure — are cultivable independent of formal credentials, and the clearest proof of that independence comes from setting their absence against their presence, in two real cases, on opposite ends of Bangladesh’s social hierarchy.
Start with the case that should disprove the thesis. In March 2025, a female student at Dhaka University was harassed by a university staff member. What followed exposed something more troubling than the original act. Dr. Samina Luthfa, professor of sociology at DU, described it at a demonstration on 9 March, 2025: the victim was met not with institutional protection but with bullying, cyberattacks, and threats of rape and murder from a section of the campus community itself. Her phrase for what had happened was exact. “The mob that sought to glorify the dishonouring of women as an act of bravery must be properly investigated, and the perpetrators must face justice.” (The Business Standard, 9 March, 2025)
Glorify is the operative word — this was a community converting cruelty into a performance of valor, inside an institution built to teach the very reasoning that should have made such conversion impossible. The people involved were not strangers to ideas about gender or institutional ethics, which circulate constantly at DU, including in the sociology department whose own faculty member surfaced the episode. The gap was not informational; it was the absence of any mechanism that turns moral knowledge into moral action once that action carries a cost — the same gap Luthfa pointed to when she noted the administration’s swift willingness to lock down the entire campus on vague safety grounds, against its hesitation to act once the offender was its own staff.
None of this indicts every student or teacher at Dhaka University, and the argument does not require that it should. A single episode, however documented, cannot stand in for the moral character of an institution housing tens of thousands of people. But that concession does not weaken the thesis — it sharpens what the thesis is actually claiming.
The argument is not that educated people are less moral than others. It is that education alone cannot predict morality, in either direction, and that a credential offers no warranty against exactly the failure this episode displays. An institution capable of producing rigorous sociological critique of itself, in the same week it failed to protect a harassed student from her own peers, is not a counterexample to that claim. It is the claim.
Set against this is a case from the opposite end of the credential spectrum, and one that draws on a narrower slice of empathy’s range: not the general capacity to recognize another’s suffering, but the moral courage to hold a correct position once holding it starts to cost something.
In 2020, a Dhaka rickshaw puller named Mohammad Shukkur, with no formal education, had a slogan painted on the back of his rickshaw: that a man’s mentality, not a woman’s clothing, was responsible for rape. The message came from Pashe Achhi, an initiative using the city’s UNESCO-recognized rickshaw-painting tradition — a folk craft the country’s educated class has long looked down on, as a vehicle for social messaging. Many rickshaw pullers approached for the campaign declined outright, fearing exactly the backlash that followed.
Shukkur did not. He kept the slogan mounted for over a year, absorbing direct abuse — people cursed at him, called him irreligious, insisted to his face that women’s clothing was in fact to blame — until weather eventually wore the paint from the metal. He has since said he intends to restore it. Asked whether the hostility frightened him, his answer was plain: a true thing does not need to be feared. (The Business Standard, 21 March, 2025)
That answer is worth sitting with, because it isolates the specific quality at stake. Shukkur was not displaying empathy in the passive sense of feeling for victims from a distance; he was converting that feeling into a public, sustained, personally costly commitment, in a setting — rural-to-urban migrant labor, with no institutional protection — where the cost was entirely his to bear. This is conscience operationalized as moral courage, and it is a narrower, more demanding thing than empathy in the abstract. Nor does this episode stand in for the moral character of rickshaw pullers as a class, any more than the DU episode stands in for its students; Shukkur was singled out by Pashe Achhi precisely because most pullers approached for the campaign declined, which makes him an outlier within his own community, not a representative of it.
What his case demonstrates is narrower and more useful than a claim about who is more moral: that the capacity for sustained moral courage is not gated by formal education, since here it appeared in someone entirely outside that system, under conditions where no institution offered him cover for holding the position. That is a claim about where the capacity can arise, not about its average distribution in either group — and it is precisely what the Dhaka University episode failed to produce, despite every institutional advantage that should have made the position easier, not harder, to hold publicly.
Read together, the two cases locate the actual variable, and it is not years of schooling. It runs through exposure to consequence — whether a person has had to absorb the cost of a conviction rather than simply hold one in the abstract — and through forms of cultural transmission that have nothing to do with formal curricula. But the comparison raises a further possibility, more speculative than the core thesis and worth flagging as such: that the relationship may run in the opposite direction from what credentialing assumes.
Dhaka University’s institutional protections — its disciplinary procedures, its claim to safety, its capacity to lock down a campus on demand — gave the mob involved a kind of cover, a sense that the system would absorb the consequences of their conduct. Shukkur had no such cover; the full cost of his position was his alone to bear, with nothing standing between his conviction and the backlash it drew.
Two cases cannot establish that institutional insulation causes moral courage to atrophy — that would need far broader evidence than a single contrast can supply. What they support is narrower: that insulation from consequence is at least plausibly not neutral with respect to the outcome, and that the university’s structural advantages cannot be assumed to have helped cultivate the disposition the institution claims to instill.
The position this leaves is specific, not rhetorical. Educational attainment should stop functioning as a proxy for moral trustworthiness in how institutions are evaluated and how individuals are judged. Moral failure from educated communities should stop being treated as an anomaly requiring special explanation, because it is not one — it is a predictable outcome of assuming a system built to certify knowledge will also, incidentally, certify conscience.
What the Dhaka University case shows is not that universities fail occasionally; it is that they have no real mechanism for converting moral knowledge into moral action when that action is costly, because no one ever built one, on the assumption that the degree would somehow cover it. What Shukkur’s case shows is that the mechanism can exist entirely outside that system, sustained by nothing but the cost one person was willing to absorb. Neither case licenses a sweeping claim about literacy or schooling in general.
What they do license is narrower and harder to dismiss: that moral courage has to be built deliberately — through accountability, through consequence, through exposure to harm that no classroom simulates — and that nothing about holding a degree does this work automatically.
Mahmud Newaz Joy is a contributor at Muktipotro.
