What's the point of being earnest?

Granted, being earnest and honesty isn't useful in many situations. In most professional experiences, it must be carefully applied.

But the value of honesty and being earnest in college is important depending on what you consider college to be. Many people view college as a pre-cursor to reality. But recognizing that it's merely a "pre-cursor" and not the actual thing makes a big difference. Didn't you ever wonder why the stakes seemed so high in mere college? Didn't it ever strike you as strange that an 18-year old kid, otherwise completely immature, unwise, inexperienced demanded respect merely because he could read homer in greek? To a real person in the real world, that's just snobby and childish because there's more to a man than the things he can pick up in books, just as there's more to people than the shiny cars and bling they flash around.

I tend to think of college as a training ground as well as a precursor to the real thing. Being guarded all the time is sort of frigtening in such an environment because to truly challenge yourself intellectually, you have to let your guard down, be stupid sometimes, be brilliant others. Because you don't learn by saying the judicious or diplomatic thing ALL the time. And that's what college is for - a place for you to learn things so that you can be a better human being. Memorizing and getting an easy or even a difficult A isn't enough. We learn in adversity but only if there's an environment accepting enough that we don't feel like we're always surrounded by sharks. I rarely felt challenged by my classmates who, as you say, were too scared to say something negative because you might have to walk past them everyday on the street. If you aren't challenged by the people around you, you don't grow. What I felt a lot of the time - not always - was an intense sense of wanting to get ahead without enjoyment of the process. And I think a lot of people at our school geniunely enjoy the process. It's just that the process is hard and our school environment is so unforgiving to weakness. As a result, everything was so gentile. Even our bi-partisan debates were so gentile. That's not the real world. That's the isolated world of elites who have too many roles to play.

College is supposed to be difficult but not in a way that makes you wary of people, distrustful, and sometimes uncaring. I would never wish college to be that for my children.