It's not called the central dogma of biology for nothing!
But seriously, in my understanding it's taught that way to try to rid people of mystical pre-evolutionary notions. Once they have firmly grasped the basics they can move on to super-interesting corners where stranger things may happen, and about which people are still arguing.
The physics analogy is people arriving with mistaken intuition about "when does the dead body roll out of the truck" level problems. The fact that Newton isn't the end of the story doesn't spare you from having to un-learn Hollywood/Aristotle first. Nor will your earlier confusion be any help in wrapping your head around post-Newton concepts.
True. Most of what I've been taught after high school feels like "you've been lied to, everything you were taught in high school was wrong or grossly oversimplified and now you need to unlearn it all and relearn from scratch." Makes you wonder what the purpose of high school was in the first place.
> Makes you wonder what the purpose of high school was in the first place.
Oh, I have an opinion about that:
Well. First and above all the first purpose of school and high school is to learn to follow authority (edit: authority in every other meanings. Tthe first authority to submit oneself to is the school). This is the first brick and if it's not assimilated in a way that suits the school the student will get thrown out of the system.
A century ago there's the industrial revolution mantra: produce workers who can read and understand semi-complex or complex instructions in written and oral forms and manipulate tools (typewriters, screwdrivers, hydraulics, mechanics, machines, etc.).
And now there's the "learn to learn" mantra because few things taught in the 'regular', 'normal' or 'general' school and high school cursus land jobs in the post-industrial and the information societies. Does not seem to apply to trade schools.
> The first purpose of school and high school is to learn to follow authority.
I think that depends which person at the school you ask. I am married to a low-income neighborhood high school English teacher and we talk curriculum often. Seems to me that it's about striking a balance: One side is what you said, the other side is teaching students to unite against that authority in productive ways.
Too far in one direction, and you wind up with a society where none of the competent people you know have enough faith in the system to run for office. Too far in the other direction and the dominant class sees the everyone else as a threat and puts walls up.
It's a difficult balance to strike, but I know a lot of teachers that work very hard at finding it.
I want to make it clear that my thought is that the first authority to submit oneself to or to follow is actually the school. Even if the school puts emphasis on critical thinking you won't have a place in it if you don't submit to its authority.
This would also explain why we don't teach fundamentals of epistemology or critical thinking, even though we constantly read in the news how crucially important these skills are, because of fake news and Russian election hackers.
Last time I heard about my country in OECD ranking (or was it the PISA ranking ?) it was mentioned that 1 out of 4 students out of high school was almost illiterate. They can (barely) read but they don't understand the meaning behind the words.
Either it's a consequence of not teaching critical thinking or a reason we don't teach it is up to debate but the results remain.
I got the same impression from people who studied chemistry after high school too though. Some things are just simplified so our children can ramp up their understanding gradually instead of having the wild complexity of the universe thrown at them in one go.
It makes no sense to leave things out of a description of a complex system to help someone to understand it better.
Have you considered educators might not want 17 year olds to understand things that are "too dangerous"? Because that happens at a pretty basic level in chemistry.
