> Why. All models are flawed, some are useful. Kids learn mixing paints, that's useful for arts and crafts. Students learn more advanced models depending on their needs.
:) Partly-in-jest paraphrase: Most all models used in science education are needlessly ghastly flawed, leaving students and their teachers steeped in misconceptions. Some are useful - for important exams, or for collaborating with teachers in pretending topics are understood, though vanishingly few provide transferable or operational understanding, let alone integrated or interdisciplinary or rough-quantitative understanding. Students develop less dysfunctional understanding depending on their needs, which can be surprisingly limited. For examples, students empirically don't need to know the color of the Sun to be first-tier astronomy graduate students, nor the order-of-magnitude size of cells to be first-tier medical graduate students, so teaching the wrong color for the Sun, starting in K and continuing into undergrad intro astronomy, and teaching size/scale unsuccessfully from middle-school through undergrad, are in some sense not failing to meet student needs.
Shrug, ok. Also, it's unclear society needs, wants, or would appreciate, or even tolerate, students making sense of the physical world.
But... it can be fun, to at least discuss and explore, how we might go about it, were that an objective to be intensively pursued. No?