Ignorance is measured by a social norm, and we decide on someone's degree of ignorance according to expectations which are formed in and by social groups. The antecedently ignorant person is not one who knows nothing, but one whose knowledge is at a minimum, whose knowledge falls below some socially acceptable threshold, or is limited to the bare necessities of life known to everyone. Most of the daily activities of life are carried on the basis of what antecedently ignorant people know very well. What the antecedently ignorant do not know and will have to learn, can usually be learned with little or no difficulty. We do not blame children for being antecedently ignorant, but we do censure older people who remain childishly ignorant.
Antecedent ignorance is both innocent and remediable.
The next kind of ignorance is invidious ignorance. By invidious ignorance I mean ignorance of such a kind that when we say a person is ignorant we distinguish between him as he is and him as we think he ought to be, or between him and his less ignorant fellows, so that he might well be envious of them in point of knowledge. I indicate that one student is invidiously ignorant by giving him a lower grade that I do his classmates. Invidious ignorance is punished, and it is not innocent. It is, fortunately, to a large extent remediable.