When I was in high school, it was more about 'is it fun to watch/read?' than if it made sense. As I got older and got a broader understanding of the sciences, it was more like 'science fiction is science fiction and science is science'. I've got room in my life for both because I understand that they both influence each other.
You missed my point. Real science is messy, often counterintuitive, and made up of competing, often mutually incompatible, yet still usefully predictive bits, and what's taught in primary and secondary is not enough to grasp it most of the time.
You don't want a high school chem student making yout pharmaceuticals... they just don't know the exceptionalities of the process well enough to avoid poisoning you with the wrong isomer...
(ACS Reactions You Tube had a vid on isomeric issues in AZT released today)
If it's clean and clear enough for a high school grad, it's a fiction of Scientists, because such nice, clean descriptives simply don't accurately describe the theories in use.
If you try to use simple newtonian gravity, you'll miss any planet smaller than Uranus with any space probe you launch. When you add Einsteinian dilation, you
still don't have an accurate course... it's much closer, but you still need to account for the solar wind forces, the light-pressure generated by the radioisotope thermal generator, and the static density and wave pressures of the interplanetary medium. That all combines to get you out to Pluto close enough for a final burn into orbit... Assuming, of course, that the mass distribution is what you think it is on the probe so the center of thrust and center of mass match up... and to know that accurately, you have to add the temperature and the optical and radio-isotope decay...
Science Fiction, including most of what's taught in elementary school, is smoothed over, simplified.
