Comment by bonoboTP

It's also simply hard to teach most of this beyond caricature level in secondary school. Ideally it wouldn't be a separate thing but integrated into how you learn the science itself. And this is somewhat attempted yes, there are often small-print framed stories in textbooks about how a discovery came about, but learning the actual science is hard enough and physics is better taught topicwise instead of chronologically with all the dead ends. The modern picture of the world is complicated enough without teaching how the process of it unfolded. Especially while the students haven't really learned the necessary context in history class to even have a "mental map" of the centuries, to place major temporal landmarks on it, to know who lived in parallel with whom.

This is the biggest issue in general, that the material is fragmented and separated. You learn about romanticism and its poets in literature class but it doesn't get connected to how romanticism motivated changes in scientific attitudes and what discoveries are from that era etc. I needed at least 10 years of curious self-directed reading after high school to appreciate such things. Just randomly arriving at the same topic from different angles and different disciplines. The same familiar characters and events start to pop up at new places in new light. Then suddenly even articles that would have seemed super boring started to become interesting because a story could be surprising and counterintuitive. If you have no background knowledge or expectation or intuition then any story is "meh" and not "who would have thought that!".

Indeed if I sent high school myself the OP article, he wouldn't get much out of it, other than a flood of names, dates and boring facts. Once you are out of college, you have points of reference to be curious what all those years were actually based on.

And my complaint was more that it also doesn't happen in university education.