Curricula are hard to change for the same reason widely-used apis are hard to change: it’s the downstream dependencies. There’s a shared understanding of what “took undergrad differential equations” means, and breaking from that has a cost. If you teach differently, your students will be at a disadvantage because they won’t know the things futre courses, tests and employers expect them to know. Maybe that will be outweighed by the objectively superior education you’ll have provided with your bold new approach, and maybe not.
Not that we should give up and resign ourselves to outmoded received pedagogy, but these are hard breaking changes and we should set our expectations accordingly.
Otoh biology classes don’t suffer from this as much. Textbooks are routinely updated to reflect new understandings. Professors seem to have a lot of choice with what they cover, often highlighting their own subfield where they can speak more to it. Physics classes in comparison felt like a factory. You’d also pay twice as high a lab fee as any biology or chemistry lab to play with 40 year old brass weights and frictionless cars.
Not that we should give up and resign ourselves to outmoded received pedagogy, but these are hard breaking changes and we should set our expectations accordingly.