Note: another screed which most readers will prefer to skip. You are warned - venturing below the red line may produce narcolepsy and/or pseudobulbar affect.
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I find it so interesting to read your background because it's similar yet in some ways 180 degrees opposite to mine. You're in the humanities and I'm in the sciences, and in many ways they are by definition opposites. Feynman struggled with this later in his life. He could not understand art, so he made a deal. He would teach physics to an artist who would spend the same amount of time teaching him art. And he concluded, as do I, that there is very little intersection between the two (let's leave math ~OUTT of this as it is neither a science nor an art butt is something that does bridge the two). He tried, so let's give him that. Some may see aspects of art in science - the beauty of nature, the weird match of mathematics to our reality (so far as we perceive it), I've even called some experiment designs "elegant". Butt I do not consider any of that to be art in the context of humanities - which is a human artifact created by artisans (arguably elegant experiment design might fit into that category). Certainly art and TECHNOLOGY blend together; Steve Jobs and "his" Macintosh and iPhone are Exhibits 1 and 2 for that proposition. Art and science - errrr.... notsomuch. Science and religion - NEVER.
You wrote "And in many fields, especially in the humanities, you'll need to know what the authoritative sources are." Welp, in science we have by definition no "authoritative sources". We read other scientists' "objective" work - the data, observations, experimental design - butt take those with skepticism - and their conclusions with a truckload of salt. Our goal is to disprove the existing models that we use only as predictive guides. We never defer to authority. One of the great things about seminars is when a grad student asks some famous person to explain something about their presentation and it pokes a hole in the whole shebang - the big name dude is deflated by a 20 year old kid asking a question and he/she's at the podium and embarrassed and grasping for a recovery. We had one faculty blowhard who showed his low opinion of a seminar by taking out clippers and loudly clipping his fingernails during a presentation. It was great to see a guy who quit his lab because the blowhard was a difficult person later do work in another lab at another institution and deflate the blowhard's whole life's work by busting his paradigm to shreds. That former grad student now holds the faculty spot and the exact laboratory that his former blowhard major professor held before he "moved on" to a Federal national lab and retirement. A "name" means nothing - the data speaks for itself. A "name" gets you awards, endowed chairs, oodles of grant funding, and a hefty travel, writing, and speaking schedule, butt it doesn't make you an authority on schitt. Ever.
Of course we read others work in an area of interest, and we have informal "prestige rankings" of journals and citation indices, butt some of the breakthrough stuff is consigned to the lesser journals because it is widely disbelieved when first reported. A Nobel prizewinner went from a dumpy basement lab directly to Stockholm to accept the award - because nobody believed his crazy idea and he got the shittiest lab and published in second- and third-rate journals. I knew him well. Great guy. Lesson is that we have no authoritative sources. A scientific "garage band" on cassette tape is worth listening to and weighting as much as the "name" lab equivalent of the Vienna Philharmonic playing Mozart. We disbelieve everything from everyone . Or we should. I am at the skeptical end of the spectrum of people who call themselves scientists (as was Feynman also ) and tend to be extremely rigorous in the criteria that needs to be met and "proven" before I will accept it as being meaningful. There is no Miranda Priestly in the world of science, nor any Picasso.
Here's another difference between us; you wrote "Most secondary school, and even college, students won't be doing primary research". Not so in the sciences. I began doing real research my second year of undergrad - work that was useful to the professor's grant research. As an undergrad, I also did "paper research" for another professor, filling an area he was interested in butt didn't have the time to review - so I spent the summer compiling and summarizing the area for him in a mini-thesis and we tossed around some ideas for experiments. He was a very cool guy - played violin in the local orchestra into his early '90s as a hobby. Now, I also used undergrads to do lab research and I even credited two of them as co-authors on a few of my papers; both of them are now full professors. That is an example of undergrads doing real original research and seeing it published. You can do that in science. You can be 14 or 15 and be doing serious work as long as you're supervised and have a good mentor who gives a shit about you knowing how to do science. I've had a lot of great mentors and I hope I've mentored others well. At least three of my former undergrad assistants are now full professors at top universities and one a principle investigator at a national laboratory abroad. If I can credit myself for anything regarding them, it is that I MOTIVATED them, treated them as equals and worthy of my time and was respectful of their ideas. Together we accomplished things that nobody else in the world ever had before we did. Maybe it was important, maybe even "right" - nobody can know for sure. Butt we "knew" something (again, nothing is gospel truth in science) of significance before anyone else in the world did. Pure intravenous methamphetamine! They had FUN (as did I) - we'd work late nights - til the sun came up oftentimes and go ~OUTT for breakfast together at a local 24 hour diner that also made donuts starting at 4AM - so we'd get the first donuts still hot from the oven - and weekends - because we loved finding ~OUTT stuff and couldn't wait. And when the reprint request cards tumble in from all over the world and people want to collaborate with you on future work, it's like my dad seeing my grandpa and I returning from fishing using the old outboard that he couldn't fix butt I did. Priceless. You feel valuable. Now you might have been totally wrong and proven so in the long run in your conclusions and speculations, butt if your data was honest and the experiments soundly designed - that schitt is going to stand forever (as long as humans are around). Data don't lie. Experiments may be flawed in some manner, butt the data that it yielded, if honestly reported, is as close as we will ever get to truth. Only our interpretation of it may be wrong.
So science is a bit different than humanities in many ways. Butt similar in some - the critical thinking, the confrontation of incompatible ideas, the requirement to document data (or sources) and methods, the fellowship of others who share your area(s) of interest so one has people to talk to about subjects of mutual interest at a sophisticated level. In my experience, science profs tend to be a lot less self-important and blowhardtastic than a lot of humanities profs (in MY esperience). I had a philosophy course (to meet a requirement) and in a paper I postulated that there was no reason I could thnk of why a machine (such as a silicon-based or other non-carbon-based machine) could not be as much of a "being" as a human. I pointed ~OUTT in detail that humans are in fact nothing butt molecular machines - a very complex set of inter-relate chemical reactions. The philosophy prof laughed at that. I asked him how he could so easily discard my position. His answer was "It's obvious. A machine cannot be a being because a machine cannot have a soul." I asked him where he gott that idea from. He said "Because it's intuitively obvious. Do you feel like a machine? Humans have souls, and machines are just inanimate objects." - At that point I gave up and realized he was a chucklhead. I wonder if he eards about the concerns Stephen Hawking has about AI and the possible extinction of humans by the successor lifeform - intelligent machines (which is all we humans are - and of questionable intellect at that - and an emotional reptilian brain core). So understand where my generally low regard for the humanities comes from.
I took a sociology course as well - the prof didn't own a TV, radio, or read the newspaper or magazines - and his field was contemporary American society. I asked him how he could understand a media-dominated society like the US without accessing any of the media that most people are exposed to. He told me "that stuff is mostly noise and garbage, and I don't want to contaminate my mind with it." OK, I can kind of understand a desire to be "untainted" - butt he was an odd duck in many ways - always had a pipe in his mouth and mousey. Now, this fellow was a tenured full professor who was tenured when that sociology department was always ranked in the top three worldwide - sometimes #1 - so I assume this fellow was representative of professional sociologists in his analytical methods. Easiest course I ever took. We went though census data and I found out from his "brilliant" analytic methods that cigarette smoking causes divorce, that the lowest income quintile had higher rates of cancer and cardiovascular disease than the highest income quintile principally or solely because they lacked money and access to medical care (evidently it has nothing to do with the fact that they also have radically different diets, patterns of smoking, drinking, rates of STD infections that are linked to cancer, etc.). I pointed this ~OUTT to the esteemed sociologist, noting that poor people not only have much higher smoking and drinking rates (both of which are linked to cancer incidence and atherosclerosis), butt that poor folks on average eat every unhealthy diets - with BBQ (carcinogens and oxidized cholesterol and saturated fats), butter, deep-fried foods, and obesity-related foodstuffs (junk food) as compared to those in the highest income quartile. Well, this fellow just about dropped his pipe. Those obvious-as-hell factors apparently hed never been presented to this "top" sociologist. He hemmed and hawed and - like the mouse he was - walked back his conclusions and waved his hands about complex multifactorial analyses being infeasible from the limited census data. This full professor sociologist from an eminent department didn't grasp that he had made the most basic error of conflating correlation with causation. And he made this mistake repeatedly. Easiest freaking course ever. I could have aced it in fourth grade - seriously.
So, I enjoy our discourse and just want you to understand where I am coming from. I'm a simple guy. I don't understand the concept of "fashion" or why anybody needs it or even bothers with such nonsense. In collitch when my hair gott too long for comfort, I'd go to the collitch barbershop and get it cut - until I figured ~OUTT that I could just buy my own electric clippers with the numbered fences and cut my own hair peridically to a uniform "3" and be done with that hassle. Saves money, trips, and shampoo. I do enjoy looking at some art, butt I don't really have an interest in "understanding" art movements or what is in vogue at the moment. Nor do I understand (IMO) asshats like Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, Dali, Joey Ramone, or who the f'ck is dumb enough to pay $20 million for a painting other than to flip it to a dumber sucker later on at a higher price. I have no interest in understanding the personal lives of Eddy Poe or Sam Clemens - their works stand (or should) stand by themselves without need to reference the personal lives of the authors - that's simply gossip in my view.
You also mentioned the difficulty high school teachers have reaching students. My wife was a high school science teacher. She quit after a year - demoralized that she was making any difference at all. By the time most kids get to high school, they've largely been ruined by the rote and regimentation of grade school - and what incentive to learn that hasn't been destroyed is then damaged by hormones and social issues of that age bracket.
You also mentioned the "I don't know the answer" matter. That's crucial. You must always admit when you don't know the answer to a question posed by a student (or anyone really). Nothing is worse that a bullschitt answer to discredit a teacher. I always told/tell students that they should feel free to ask ANY question and that they should be prepared for me to not know the answer, tell them that, and then either find ~OUTT for the next session and/or ask them HOW they would go about finding the answer to it. That's what I showed my son - when he or anyone asks/asked me something I didn't know, I made sure he saw me unashamedly admit I didn't know - so he would never be afraid to admit ignorance. If his dad wasn't ashamed to not know something, then why should he be. I am proud that he is not ever afraid to admit he doesn't know something. He often calls me ~OUTT challenging assumptions I've made or with counterarguments, and he beats me with increasing frequency to a pulp if I've launched from a wobbly premise or a questionable leap of logic. He and I took a long drive several weeks ago and discussed whether or not a Grand Unified Theory of physics was even possible in theory, and why the Standard Model can be accurate yet completely and utterly wrong - it can be 100 percent predictive and yet false. This discussion made me immensely proud; nothing makes a dad happier than when the son's capabilities match or surpass dad's. He's already well ahead of me in math skills too - because we started him early and kept him interested in it - he got interested and MOTIVATED so he excelled. Plus he didn't have any of that pesky set theory nonsense (strangely that's on his to-do list in math classes).
When somebody says to me "I don't know" - it impresses me, not the converse. Now, I've often had to say that to clients - and ask them sometimes basic questions about stuff I ought to know butt don't. However, they soon learn that this is a feature and nott a bug. I want to understand everything about their stuff and I won't gloss over something even if it would seem embarrassing not to know it - I'll ask. In the type of people I work with, this buys a lot of credibility - albeit not at the first incidence always. When I begin asking them questions they don't know, they are more open to admit their ignorance. When I point ~OUTT things in their own work that they haven't thought about, then they realize my prior admission of ignorance in repsonse to a question I should have known was not a general statement about my knowledge base or capabilities. Plus they usually love explaining stuff. It's a good ice-breaker and builds mutual trust. I hate salesmen and hand-wavers. I also have a prejudice (perhaps irrational) that folks who feel the need to dress to the nines, wear a Rolex, and drive superclean uber-expensive cars do so generally ~OUTT of a feeling of inferiority and their need to use status symbols to impress because they feel (rightly or nott) that they don't have the goods in their own skin. I often find such people will almost never say "I don't know" because of that fear. They are using a facade as cover and fight to maintain that. I can't respect that. These are the poseurs.
The truth is we're ALL f'king dumb. We're chimps/gorillas with less body hair and worse sinus drainage. If the smartest of us know 0.0000000001 percent of all there is to be known and the dumbest know 1 percent of what the smartest person knows - is that really a huge deal? If you and I are walking from Times Square in NYC to Integral's bungalow in Malibu and you're on 44th and 9th Ave and I'm on 44th and 8th Ave it's not such a big difference. (Integral - note that in this metaphor I've assigned your bungalow as the seat of complete and total knowledge.)
