I’m skeptical of your claim that primary sources are better than secondary books. In particular, it seems that the insight-to-effort ratio is very small, as given a secondary book which comes recommended by people knowledgeable in the field, it seems you can get approximately the same insights as a primary source, but with far far less effort.
Can you expand on why you think either the fidelity of the insight transfer from the primary to secondary source is small, or why I’m overestimating the difficulty of reading primary sources (or some other reason you think I should care more about primary sources which I haven’t thought of)?
I definitely don’t mean to say that classes shouldn’t have secondary sources; they should and these sources are important (I am less excited about tertiary sources). I think a key to primary sources is something like the ability to read current sources as primary sources. If you develop the skills to be able to understand primary sources in the context of history, it helps enable you to be able to evaluate primary sources of today. I see history as a good way to learn how to evaluate the world at present, and the world at present has more primary than secondary sources about it.
I’m skeptical of your claim that primary sources are better than secondary books. In particular, it seems that the insight-to-effort ratio is very small, as given a secondary book which comes recommended by people knowledgeable in the field, it seems you can get approximately the same insights as a primary source, but with far far less effort.
Can you expand on why you think either the fidelity of the insight transfer from the primary to secondary source is small, or why I’m overestimating the difficulty of reading primary sources (or some other reason you think I should care more about primary sources which I haven’t thought of)?
I definitely don’t mean to say that classes shouldn’t have secondary sources; they should and these sources are important (I am less excited about tertiary sources). I think a key to primary sources is something like the ability to read current sources as primary sources. If you develop the skills to be able to understand primary sources in the context of history, it helps enable you to be able to evaluate primary sources of today. I see history as a good way to learn how to evaluate the world at present, and the world at present has more primary than secondary sources about it.