Here's my answer to the question I posed on 2/15/19 2:28 PM:
1) ☐ True, or ☑ False: Attraction and repulsion between electric charges at the atomic scale explain the structure, properties, and transformations of matter, as well as the contact forces between material objects.
2) Explain your answer. How do you know?
Electrical interactions, by themselves, favor a situation where all
the electrons sit on top of the protons. In thermal equilibrium at
any halfway reasonable temperature, this predicts that all matter
will have the same density as a neutron star, which differs by about
15 orders of magnitude from the observed density of everyday objects.
Electrical interactions are less than half of the real explanation.
Electrical interactions are the /potential/ energy part of the
explanation. It is the /kinetic/ energy that explains why atoms
are bigger then nuclei. And you need quantum mechanics to explain
why the kinetic energy is as big as it is. This is the easiest
QM calculation in the world. Leaving it out is madness.
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Some people immediately answer "true" to the given question. They
know it "must" be true because it is a direct quote from the Next
Generation Science Standards, which have been adopted as mandatory
for high schools in a great many states.
If the NGSS had said that electrical interactions were *part* of
the explanation, I wouldn't be complaining. But that's not what
they said.
To rub salt in the wound, all the lesson plans I've seen that
address this element of the standard go roughly like this:
a) Assert the statement we are trying to prove:
Thing A "explains" thing B.
b) Carry out some unrelated pointless activity.
c) Assert that the statement has been proved.
This is a travesty. People complain that students don't show
much skill at critical reasoning. I say students are perfectly
capable of such reasoning; they've just been trained not to
show it during school hours.
Why should we expect students to understand what "explanation"
is (let alone what "causation" is) if we feed them stuff like
this?
There is also the process-management question: How does stuff
like this make it into a standard? In the real world outside
the ivory tower, people don't tolerate standards with wrong
stuff in them.
To partially answer my own question: It's partly because
almost nobody looks at education standards. It's sound and
fury, signifying nothing.