a sense of intellectual advance

Given my week at school last week, I don't think I'm buying this. Stupid is as stupid does.

It is obviously unfair to expect high school students or college freshmen to arrive at opinions that are original or profound. What is important is that they have a sense of intellectual advance, and that it is justified. We who find their views naive forget that everybody must start somewhere, and that at one time our opinions were equally superficial and simplistic.
-- Ellsworth Barnard, English for Everybody 130-31 (1979)