Lying to children - when it becomes a problem...

According to the BBC many Primary School teachers are not confident in delivering Science. This is unsurprising really.  Illiteracy in science is a perennial problem amongst arts graduates, as has been noticed and argued about before.  I have to say I think Snow was off the mark in that most scientists I know have a love of literature or music or art or film....whereas total ignorance of or disbelief in science seems to be a badge of pride amongst the humanities studying crunchy muesli liberal classes.  Biased viewpoint naturally.
But I find in general that Foals schoolteachers have no more idea of what science is about than I have of the inner workings of Siva's lower colon.
I think many scientists are aware of, and irritated by the hijacking of terms that normally issues from the woo or pseudoscience movements.  Organic is one example that pisses me off.  I trained as an organic chemist originally, though it has been years since I did much of that.  Although anyone who was Diabetic or had Erectile Disfunction in the early naughties owes me and my Oompa Loompas a debt of gratitude.  But still the lunatic crackpots at the soil asociation, with their astrologically guided plantings, sympathetic magic and homeopathy have stolen the term Organic in order to make money from it.  In fact one of the more perniccious word-thefts is this sort of thing, where a science term is attached to a product in order to boost sales, regardless of the effect or the truth.  I can almost guarantee this is the case for any science term attached to a product...from the polyunsaturates in margarine, which it now appears have bugger all effect on health, through the probiotic yoghurts, which seem to have an effect but only really when shoved in the other end to the hair products that contain nutrients for your hair.
Think about that for a minute.  All those proteins and coenzymes and dna fragments for your hair to eat.  I find it a little alarming to be honest because hair is dead.  It is a dead husk emitted by your hair follicles.  You may as well liquefy baked beans and rub it into the dessicated corpus of Lady Thatcher and expect her to rise frothing from the grave demanding the right to buy burial plots.  It is well established that the undead eat either blood or brains so if you want zombie hair thats what to dunk your head in.  I have the idea for an Elizabeth Bathory range of shampoos...

There are more subtle ways to get terminology wrong and worryingly this is what seems to be happening at Key Stage 2.  One that caught my eye was a reference to reversible and irreversible change in the materials section.
This is the offending item.   You note that we are meant to say that melting chocolate is a reversible change?  Sounds plausible eh?  And probably due to the wrongheaded illiterate monkey who designed this curriculum it may be in context correct.
However the slight perturbation in the earths orbit you are feeling is due to the combined spin of Ludwig Boltzmann and J. Willard Gibbs spinning in their graves punctuated by my head hitting the table.  Because this is subtly and perniciously incorrect in a way that makes my job at degree level soooooo much harder and also subtly skews childrens view of the universe.  Put simply it ignores entropy.
Entropy is one of the laws of thermodynamics.  The second to be exact.  Which can be summed up as "give up guys you is doooooomed" .  Entropy sets limits on how efficient a process can be.  Entropy states that nothing is ever perfect, no process can happen without a loss of energy to chaos.  We know this is true.
You meet entropy in real life.  Think Mobile Phone.  Your battery lasts about 2 years doesnt it?  towards the end it doesnt hold a charge well, or doesnt charge at all.  Why?  well what is happening when you charge is electrical energy being turned into chemical potential energy.  And when you use the phone it goes the other way.  But each cycle some of that energy is lost to chaos, disrupting the chemistry of the phone.  Entropy at work.
The terms reversible and irreversible are already defined in thermodynamics.  It is technically possible to melt chocolate reversibly but that would be under circumstances where an infinitesimally small change of temperature would reverse the change.  In the real world this is practically impossible. And in fact this is the classical non-statistical definition.  In the Boltzmann world we live in now ( Boltzmann is a deity in thermodynamics) a reversible chocolate melt would mean that every particle down to the atomic size of chocolate would have to return to exactly the same position and energy it had at the start of the process.  In other words to the same microstate.  Given the number of microstates is effectively countably infinite, and the initial microstate is unitarilly finite the chances of that happening are almost the definition of zero...
I know this sounds like me being picky but other laws of thermodynamics are taught at this level.  Given that the second law is actually the most important one, the one that gives time a direction for fsm's sake, why not get it right, or at least give it a mention?
And while we are at it stop teaching the Rutherford and Bohr models of the atom for the love of all that is tealike!  They are outdated, incorrect and confusing.  They do not help teach anything useful and they make my life hellish.