I see. It is honestly difficult to tell exactly what you mean. Education is, of course, essential to making change for the better, but the content of that education is just as important. Being selfless as a person on an individual can mean doing good things while actually entrenching the forces that create systemic suffering. For example, volunteering to feed people and convincing others to do the same. It would be difficult to call that a bad thing. And yet, the way it is funded tends to mean it is a way to distract from the root causes, from what impoverishes and deprives, from the destruction of community and lives. There are entire industries predicated on converting people’s empathy and desire to help each other into a tax write off and cheap PR.
So yes, there is an education problem there, but it is more challenging than teaching empathy alone. Empathy is only a basic starting point and is insufficient. One must plug into a political program that correctly analyses societal systems and directs action through an organized program intended to address those systems.
The key is that once you emphasize the content, the discussion itself changes. It ia no longer abstract, just about knowledge, but is now a political education: what are the forces at work causing suffering (it is not just ignorance), how do they function, and how can we work together to address them?
The reason this us so important is that oppressive forces are mainstream and dominent and they will determine was avenues you have for, say, charity. The system will craft society such that your work provides a release valve for the suffering it causes, which can actually entrench and normalize those oppressive forces. They provide the funding, after all. They will expect to be credited for their “generosity” with ill-gotten gains and, say, a carceral system they maintain premised on punishment rather than public betterment and healing. People motivated by empathy, who are taught empathy, may get caught up in that charity system and thereby, overall, help cement the opprrssive ruling powers that create the disposession in the first place.
So, one muat be educated in correct ideas with sound analysis based on a critical study of society and its material oppressive forces. You must know how the political economic system functions if you are to understand the roots of suffering. And must then push farthee to ask how it has been challenged historically and how you might assist that process.