I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can’t be learnt in lecture halls.

Blue contrasts formal, academic instruction with the moral education that comes from lived experience—especially experiences of vulnerability, exclusion, or being treated unfairly (“the other end of the stick”). The quote suggests that compassion is not primarily an intellectual achievement but an earned capacity, developed through contact with suffering (one’s own or others’) and the humbling recognition of shared human frailty. In Blue’s characteristic ethical-humanist register, the line implies that institutions can transmit knowledge, but they cannot reliably produce empathy; that requires encounters that break complacency and force imaginative identification with those who are powerless. The remark also carries a quiet critique of privilege: some people must learn these lessons the hard way, while others may never be compelled to learn them at all.