Who's illiterate?

When returning from the mosque today after the Friday prayers, I saw an old man walking a few feet ahead of me. He didnt look well off. He was wearing a wrinkled white kameez and a dhoti. He had a white cloth tied around his head in a worker-type turban. I didnt quite catch what (if anything) was in his feet.
Anyway, with that description, you can see that he looks like the stereotypical paindoo, un parh jahil. As I walked, he bent down, picked up a banana peel that was lying on the road, and threw it off away from the road. He missed a piece of it, so he bent again and subjected the remaining bit to the same fate.
I kept walking, but in my mind I paused, and thought, would I have done the same with that peel or would I just have avoided it. Except for a few people you can count on your fingers, most people would've just walked by. If I had a choice, I'd pick that jahil over all the educated people. Shame on us!