The pro-secondary-sources, 'you need to read our introductions first' side of this argument is a kind of neo-scholasticism, all about extracting the syllogisms from books and neatly categorizing and labeling their arguments for bored museum-goers who pay to look at the exhibits. https://twitter.com/zenahitz/status/1296441224115769344

The medieval universities were populated by the middle/poorer classes, not the wealthy/privileged; the textbookifying of learning was in fact a way of increasing access to knowledge, not to say philosophy. But this egalitarian/elite axis is really beside the point.

To return to the museum analogy: there are some visitors who are excited about all the labels & displays and want to find out what goes into making them, so they stay there and become curators. But this is an entirely different enterprise, or way of life, than that of philosophy.

And philosophy is a way of life, not so much a "skill." It makes sense to use this word as @zenahitz does here, in contrast with "content," but it's somewhat misleading; it sounds technical, but all it means is: learn to think through these questions and books for yourself.

Contrast the scholastics with the Renaissance humanists. They were the wealthy/privileged, with time to spare-- they emphasized reading original texts in original languages, bypassing the fortresses of terminology built by the scholastic gatekeepers.

Thus while what they called for students to do seemed much more daunting, w/ their insistence on the perfection of Latin style, it was implicitly more open to many; they spoke the language of human things & of the city, not technical jargon, not a code language for the initiated.

So-called professional philosophers today, raised on the introductions & museum exhibits, are often startlingly illiterate when it comes to literature, politics, religion, history-- unless it's "philosophy of"-- the juice sucked out, placed in fermaldehyde, put on display.

Those w/ a Great Books approach tend to be much more philosophical in their reading & discussion, even as they're often fuzzier in distinguishing between books, thinkers, & arguments. They make connections between literature, philosophy, & science that make "philosophers" cringe.

With our present abundance of books and leisure, there's no reason we all cannot have some part of the life of the Renaissance humanists, and no reason we should prefer scholasticism at the HS and undergraduate levels. Students should learn to think and ask questions...

...not analytically in the manner of a scientist, but dialectically and metastrophically; that is, students ask questions which, by means of interrogating a great book, reflect on themselves. This, not pseudo-research papers, should be the point of their essays as well.

Undergraduate philosophy courses which give students a specious sense of mastery of great thinkers by cramming their heads with terms like "virtue ethics" and "ontology," boxes and drawers for their specimens, are, for most, worse than a waste of time.

Better: give them the living things themselves, no matter how mysterious, dangerous, spiky, or slick, and have them wrestle with them. What they learn by asking disciplined, serious questions of such works, though imprecise, is infinitely more valuable than pretend mastery.