[dabbernaught420]

Wasn't my experience taking courses in political science and political philosophy. Was exposed to a lot more viewpoints discussing with working class family, reading literature myself (reading primary sources and focused secondary sources was actually often strongly discouraged by my professors as an inefficient use of time, something that would of course change doing post-grad work, but that isn't what we're discussing here), etc.

To the extent that viewpoints not part of the accepted doctrine are presented, they are presented poorly and without passion.

[afthonos]

> reading primary sources and focused secondary sources was actually often strongly discouraged by my professors as an inefficient use of time, something that would of course change doing post-grad work, but that isn't what we're discussing here

I think that’s exactly right. Reading primary sources is much more complicated than reading undergrad-level sources: you need to read not just the source, but enough supporting material to understand the context the source was writing in, competing movements and how they were viewed at the time, etc. You simply don’t have time in a one-semester course on, say, political thought in the 19th century, to dive into the details of any one particular movement, be it abolitionism, women’s suffrage, or anything else. The scope of these questions is enormous, and whatever primary sources a student is likely to find will have tremendous selection bias, because the student won’t even know what sources they’re ignoring or what context they might be missing.

Part of the professor’s job in undergraduate courses is to give the lay of the land. And if an enterprising student decides to put in the primary source work, to not let that one student derail the conversation into hyperfocusing on a single topic, while hopefully also preventing the student from getting hopelessly lost.