Comment by lubujackson

Not OP, and it was a couple decades ago, but I certainly remember professors and teachers saying things like "this isn't really how X works, but we will use the approximation for now in order to teach you this other thing". That is if you were lucky, most just taught you the wrong (or incomplete) formula.

I think there is validity to the approach but sciences would be much, much improved if taught more like history lessons. Here is how we used to think about gravity, here's the formula and it kind of worked, except... Here is planetary orbits that we used to use when we assumed they had to be circles. Here's how the data looked and here's how they accounted for it...

This would accomplish two goals - learning the wrong way for immediate use (build on sand) and building an innate understanding of how science actually progresses. Too little focus is on how we always create magic numbers and vague concepts (dark matter, for instance) to account for structural problems we have no good answer for.

Being able to "sniff the fudge" would be a super power when deciding what to write a PhD on, for instance. How much better would science be if everyone strengthened this muscle throughout their educatuon?