Can I offer an alternative view.
I'm an aeronautical engineer in much of my working life - and as such I need a detailed understanding of aerodynamics, and some people doing more aerodynamically oriented jobs need a far greater understanding than I do.
But what does a private pilot, or even most professional pilots, need?
- Basic idea of flow around the lifting surfaces
- Effects of interfering with shape, criticality of the leading edge
- Relatonship between speed, area, coefficient, and lift
- Four main forces
- Profile and induced drag
- Bernoulli (mainly to explain how pitot and static pressures work and are used)
- Basic principles of stability and what it means.
The main issue to me is not whether the explanations are right or wrong, but whether they're necessary or not. The best thing we could reasonably do is get rid of all the "knowledge" that's of no real value to a pilot. Then they might remember stuff that's actually useful to them.
Much more than that belongs in either test pilot courses, or aeronautical engineering degrees, and not in pilot licence syllabi.
G