https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
One should never stop investigating new things, but let’s not pretend ideology is a matter of credentialed or non-credentialed education or sheer “intelligence” or “knowledge”. These things factor in, but what people think they have the highest incentive to ascribe to is just as important. This is part of the reason that academics aren’t more open-minded on average but just more adept at defending their positions (or seeing where some element isn’t necessary and letting go of it to better defend the core).
That said, Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is a cool book.
There is nothing wrong with being kind and empathetic, but it’s the core of Marxism to attempt a scientific approach at socialism that is independent of particular proclivities or values among individuals. If your system requires people to be “virtuous” according to some arbitrary definition of the term (as all definitions of the term would be), your system will live only on luck and die very quickly.
There are elements of “human nature” which are important to Marx, but they are more fundamental and generalizable, like how humans transform their environment to suit their desires, etc. Ideology is usually relevant on a sociological level, e.g. “In all ages, the ruling ideology is the ideology of the ruling class.”
Personally being kind and empathetic is a good thing, in fact a very good thing, so long as you know where it can lead you astray. This is something that the film “Young Marx” deals with excellently, for example in this scene.