A few comments here:
I think by's problem with fearing to appear ignorant, even if honestly so, is more an indictment of the idea that ignorant is necessarily bad than it is an indictment of the notion of honest ignorance.
The point about young students being particularly susceptible to fear of showing ignorance is spot on. When I first went to college I had come directly out of high school with good grades but without having developed good study habits, a result of not having been challenged in high school. If I didn't understand something that was being presented in the college class, I didn't understand why I didn't understand it and did have some fear of appearing ignorant. Later, when I went back to college after four years in the Navy and two years of real life working, I understood a lot more and had lost much of my fear of appearing ignorant. If I saw that other, mostly younger (although there were some other veterans in my classes) students weren't quite grasping a concept, I would ask the stupid question. I could do this for several reasons, not the least of which was that I wasn't worried about seeming ignorant, but also because I often *did understand what the professor was trying to get across and I could tell what it was that the other students weren't understanding.
