[ceejayoz]

If you're saying that, you still haven't had the definition of "primary source" sufficiently clarified.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_source

> In the study of history as an academic discipline, a Primary Source (also called an original source or evidence) is an artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was created at the time under study. It serves as an original source of information about the topic. Similar definitions can be used in library science, and other areas of scholarship, although different fields have somewhat different definitions. In journalism, a primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation, or a document written by such a person.

Many, many things in a classroom will be primary sources.

[billysielu]

At my school (UK) we had 2 main sources - the teacher, and the textbook. Niether were primary.

Students used the internet a lot, and Encarta (lol), and were constantly getting grief from teachers for doing so.

[ceejayoz]

Your textbooks are highly likely to have contained excerpts from primary sources.

[billysielu]

thank god you know more about my education than I do.

[ceejayoz]

You really want to argue that the UK educates students without a single excerpt from the Magna Carta, without a single Churchill speech, etc.? That you went through twelve years of schooling without ever being exposed to a historical figure's own words? You were never assigned a single autobiographical work to read from?

Be my guest, but good luck getting anyone to believe it.

edit: I'll just note, additionally, that you stated "nothing in a classroom is a primary source". Even if it were true that yours was an unprecedented aberration, that general statement remains untrue.

[dang]

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html