Thanks! Less briefly (the front page having moved on)...
> tyros [...] best educators
How to explain... The publisher of a cell biology tome of a textbook, praised their hundred-ish authors, and I half-seriously quipped, "Great! And how many for the second page?" Or... It seems every decade or so, some astronomy professor emeritus goes around suggesting it's embarrassing that in a field with an unusual focus on introductory textbooks, mostly authored by astronomy professors, the coverage of what color the Sun is, is so incoherent, that even most first-tier astronomy graduate students have it wrong. Despite being trivially explainable to a 5-year old. Hasn't changed yet. I chatted with a leading astronomy education researcher and educator, and my impression was they'd given up on near-term large-scale change. Or... Can one see an atomic nucleus with naked eye? To get the correct, rather than the 'almost always correct but not here' answer, and learn of a photo, you need someone with a research focus on nucleus dynamics. It's a small subfield, and if MIT has anyone, I didn't easily find them. So my quip is "MIT in isolation lacks the physics domain expertise to easily create an awesome childrens' picture book about atoms".
My suggestion is that transformatively better science education content is possible, but creating it would seemingly require collaboration on a scope more similar to that of the original science research, than of current informal artisanal handicraft authorship with a smattering of science education research.
And that's before hitting bottlenecks like a "yeah, that would be an insightful way to teach this topic... but my students are taking the medical school entrance exam soon, and it only tests for superficial understanding here, and our time together is limited, so I'd be doing my students a disservice if I didn't focus on the what they need for the test, lest they're years of dreams and effort go for naught".
> try them [editors] one after the other
A (US) OER astronomy text has a nice online ticket database for errata. The text did the usual getting the color of the Sun wrong. Folks pointed that out. It received a common remedy - just enough of a tweak that if you already know the correct answer, you can closely read the unclear text as not being wrong. But with no hope at all that students are getting it. Last I saw, the ticket was, despite criticism, tagged 'good enough, WONTFIX'.
So there are a lot of needles I can't move, or are not worth my pushing on.
Now maybe there's some part of the Indian education community with a greater emphasis than these, on non-rote non-test deep transferable understanding of the physical world? I'd love to hear of it.
But my current thought is to target early primary with supplemental material. Teaching things far earlier than they're usually taught (escaping teaching to tests), and better enough that the misconceptions avoided can pay for the effort cost.
In the US, parts of the homeschooling community might be receptive. One tactic might be to create a supplement for a text already in widespread use. The mention of NCERT texts, had me wondering if there was somewhere one might say fruitfully drop a pdf, "Oh, you're using NCERT's solar system intro? Yeah, it has the color of the Sun wrong. It will be easier for you to understand light and color if we fix that - here you go... Oh, and that bit about planetary heat coming from the Sun? Well, ok, but it's more understandable if we explicitly mention cold space, and here's a nice example of ...".
> Chemistry [...] contradicts
Yeah. Chemistry education research describes chemistry education content using adjectives like "incoherent", and as leaving both students and teachers steeped in misconceptions. A fun US state curriculum spec required teaching both "atoms are conserved by chemical reactions" and "atoms are electrically neutral - when charged, they become instead ions" - two historical threads of definition, presented together for the entanglement and drowning of students. Years back, there was a fun letter from the editor of a chem ed journal, that was a plea "yes it needs to be gutted, but there's value too here which we should preserve...". Sigh.
Given the severely challenging constraints and incentives around textbooks, it seems to me unlikely that "talk to the textbook authors" can be a path towards transformative improvement in science education content. In any country. All the existing Sun diagrams might be revised perhaps, but adding helpful examples, or a treatment of scale, simply won't fit there. So I wondered what opportunities for workarounds might exist in an Indian context? Perhaps analogous to some homeschooling mailinglists in the US? (And if anyone has favorites, I'd love to hear of them). Thanks again.