Another thought provoking thread.
From what I remember, most people who walk through the flying school door and announce they want to learn how to fly couldn't tell you how a wing works ten minutes after you had spent an hour explaining it to them. Most people do not have the mind of an engineer, and IMO you need that to properly understand lift. Most of these people become quite safe pilots, some of them even become very competent airline pilots.
It is extremely hard to examine whether you know how a wing works using a blunt tool like a multiple guess question, unless you want 20 questions to be on wings. Given todays desire to get peoples their PPL in minimum time, this would leave no time to teach them how to work out important stuff like much usuable fuel is left in their tanks.
If you are going to examine on how a wing works better to have a short answer, or do it in the oral, but then I would need to know in advance what examiner believed in so I could teach that one to the poor student. That would become confusing.
So, as I think teaching duff info is worse than not teaching anything at all, I reckon it should be taken out of the syllabus - all the way to ATP. Save this stuff for test pilot school or Embry Riddle students.
Those students who do have the mind of an engineer and want to know how it works should be sent to denkers web site. WHen they come back they can explain it to their instructor.