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EducationAug 16, 20266 min read0views

The Fuller It Grows, the Lower It Bows

Why education should make us less likely to belittle others and what research says about empathy, media literacy, and behavior on social media.

  • Education
  • Empathy
  • Digital Literacy
  • Civility

Note: This article reflects my own thoughts and perspectives. AI was used only to assist with grammar, wording, and language refinement. The ideas, arguments, and final editorial decisions remain my own.

There is an old Indonesian philosophy that still feels relevant today: ilmu padi: the fuller the rice stalk grows, the lower it bows.

To me, this idea is not about rejecting ambition or diminishing achievement. Quite the opposite. We should be free to learn as much as we can, pursue degrees, build careers, and become experts in our fields. But the more we know, the more we should also realize how much remains beyond our understanding.

Knowledge that is truly absorbed should make arrogance harder to justify.

Yet what I sometimes see on social media seems to point in the opposite direction. People insult others so easily, mock strangers they have never met, and treat disagreement as a reason to belittle someone.

I do not think formal education is useless. The problem is that having credentials is not always the same as having an education that has truly taken root within us.

For me, education should not be measured only by how much a person knows, but also by how deeply that knowledge changes the way they treat other people.

Diplomas are not the whole story

A degree can show that someone has studied a particular field. It can develop technical skills, analytical ability, and certain ways of thinking.

But none of these necessarily teaches someone how to respect another human being.

Formal education is one part of learning. Character formation is another. When the two become separated, we can end up with people who speak eloquently, possess extensive knowledge, and hold advanced degrees, yet remain careless with the dignity of others.

That is why perhaps we should not be too surprised when someone considered “educated” can still speak cruelly on the internet.

Maybe the more important question is not:

How highly educated is someone?

But rather:

What changed within them because of that education?

What the research suggests

Of course, research does not tell us that spending more years in school automatically makes someone a better person.

The relationship is far more complicated than that.

However, several studies suggest that abilities such as empathy, social awareness, and media literacy are connected to how people recognize and respond to hostile behavior in digital spaces.

A 2023 study on hate-speech recognition found that empathy was associated with a greater ability to recognize hate speech. Awareness of how social media influences behavior also played an important role. Educational attainment and age were likewise associated with higher levels of recognition in the study. (Melchiori et al., 2023)

This is interesting because it suggests that recognizing harm is not only about what we know. It is also connected to our ability to understand the perspective and experience of another person.

Research involving adolescents in Germany and Switzerland also found that empathy was associated with lower involvement in online hate-speech perpetration. By contrast, moral disengagement when people distance themselves from the moral responsibility of their actions can strengthen the cycle in which victims later become perpetrators. Empathy can help weaken that cycle. (Wachs et al., Cyberpsychology, 2022)

None of these findings means that everyone with a high level of education will always behave kindly.

But they do point toward something important: education that develops empathy and critical awareness can help people become more conscious of how their actions affect others.

And perhaps that is where the difference lies between simply knowing something and truly learning from it.

Connectivity without literacy

We now live in a world where access to information is growing much faster than our ability to process it well.

A person can spend almost the entire day online, read hundreds of posts, follow countless arguments, and still lack the skills needed to distinguish reliable information from propaganda, provocation, or hate speech.

This is why Media and Information Literacy (MIL) matters.

UNESCO describes media and information literacy as a preventive educational response to hate speech and disinformation. The goal is not only to remove harmful content after the damage has already been done, but also to develop people's ability to think critically, understand context, and participate more responsibly in digital spaces. (UNESCO on MIL and hate speech)

I think this has become an essential part of modern education.

Today, being educated is no longer simply about being able to read information.

We also need to learn:

when information deserves our trust, when a response is better left unsent, and how to speak without unnecessarily hurting others.

Why insulting others feels so easy online

There is something about social media that makes cruelty feel cheap.

We do not always see the face of the person we are commenting on. We do not see their reaction. We know almost nothing about their life.

All we see is a profile picture, a username, or a few sentences on a screen.

That distance makes moral disengagement much easier.

“It’s just a comment.”

“Everyone does it.”

“They started it.”

On top of that, digital platforms often give more attention to content that provokes emotion. Fast reactions, anger, and conflict can attract more attention than calm and thoughtful conversations.

This is where education should help us resist those impulses.

Not only by giving us knowledge, but also by developing certain habits of mind:

  1. Perspective-taking: remembering that the person behind the screen has a full life, not just a profile we can turn into a joke.
  2. Epistemic humility: recognizing that I may be wrong; strong confidence does not necessarily mean I am correct.
  3. Media literacy: understanding that our behavior can also be shaped by platform design and the digital environments around us.
  4. Responsibility in speech: recognizing that words have consequences, especially when they can reach thousands of people.

Without these qualities, education can easily become little more than a performance of status:

higher degrees, louder contempt.

Education should not end with knowledge

This way of thinking about education is not new in Indonesia.

Long before social media existed, Ki Hadjar Dewantara understood education as something much broader than simply transferring knowledge from teacher to student.

Through the Sistem Among, education was not only concerned with intellectual ability, but with developing the whole person through cipta, rasa, and karsa roughly, thought, feeling, and will.

Knowledge should develop alongside our ability to feel and our willingness to act well.

A similar idea appears in the Javanese concept:

ngerti–ngrasa–nglakoni to understand, to feel, and then to act.

I find this idea deeply relevant today.

We may understand that humiliating another person is wrong. But if that understanding remains only theoretical and never changes the way we behave, then perhaps the learning process is still incomplete.

A person can understand ethics without practicing it.

They can talk about empathy without ever trying to understand another person.

They can know many things without becoming wiser.

This is why education also involves budi pekerti, the formation of character, where knowledge eventually becomes visible in the way someone behaves.

Ki Hadjar Dewantara also understood education as taking place across three main environments: the family, the school, and society. Character formation, therefore, is not solely the responsibility of schools or universities.

In the digital age, perhaps we should recognize another important space as well:

the internet.

It is a place where many people today learn, speak, argue, and shape their views of other human beings.

How should we measure education?

If education is meant to shape human beings, perhaps its success cannot be measured only through exam scores, degrees, or the number of certificates someone has collected.

There are other questions worth asking:

  • Does education teach us to disagree without degrading someone else?
  • Does it make us more capable of understanding another person's point of view?
  • Does it teach us to accept that we ourselves might be wrong?
  • Can we evaluate information critically before helping it spread?
  • Does knowing more make us more careful with the words we use?

And perhaps the simplest question is:

After learning more, have I also become more careful in how I treat other people?

Closing

I still believe in the philosophy of ilmu padi.

The fuller it grows, the lower it bows.

Not because knowledgeable people should make themselves small, but because the more we learn, the more reasons we have to recognize our own limitations.

Social media makes cruelty easy. We can write something in seconds and forget about it minutes later. But another person may remember those words for much longer.

Education that is truly absorbed should make us a little slower to insult, a little faster to understand, and a little more careful before treating another human being as nothing more than an object on a screen.

In the end, perhaps that is what ilmu padi really means.

The more we know, the more aware we should become of how much we still do not know. And the further education takes us, the fewer reasons we should have to look down on others.

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