Besides, your comment ignores the fact that people, in the absence of explanations (right or wrong) will make up their own model of how things work. That model is just as hard to unlearn as an incorrect view they may have been taught by an instructor. In fact, they are probably harder to unlearn because they are based on the persons own experiences.
All learning involves correcting and building on earlier concepts, there are no "tabula rasa". What is important is that people confront and integrate their own preconceptions as part of learning.
The National Academies Press book "How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School" is a good, accessible introduction to these concepts. It's on the web at http://www.nap.edu/html/howpeople1/.
This is a relevant passage: "A logical extension of the view that new knowledge must be constructed from existing knowledge is that teachers need to pay attention to the incomplete understandings, the false beliefs, and the naive renditions of concepts that learners bring with them to a given subject. Teachers then need to build on these ideas in ways that help each student achieve a more mature understanding. If students' initial ideas and beliefs are ignored, the understandings that they develop can be very different from what the teacher intends."
Wrong, the textbook authors fully believe those misconceptions themselves. I discovered this sad fact during my K6 education consulting work back in the 80s. Lies-to-children are very different than author misconceptions: they must be carefully constructed so that they don't install permanent major misconceptions in student's minds.
For example, the idea that atoms are like tiny solar systems is a "Lie" which simply explains atomic structure in classical terms, and which turns out to be relatively harmless. It doesn't form any enormous learning barrier which entirely derails our later ability to understand orbitals and quantum chem.
Good articles on the author-misconception topic: R. Feynman's "Judging books by their covers" and S J Gould's "The case of the creeping fox terrier clone"
> After my encounter with those books, I slowly realized that my own understanding of basic electricity was flawed and incomplete. I sat down and started re-teaching myself the subject. I became aware of the source of my problem: I myself had learned a bunch of electricity misconceptions as a child. Those early misconceptions gave me a faulty foundation on which to build further knowledge. As a result, any accurate information learned later became distorted in my mind even as I learned it. If the foundation is distorted, then the "building" cannot be built. It was like trying to build a brick wall on top of a garbage pile: the incoming bricks are perfectly good, but they simply did not fit upon earlier concepts, and any structures that I managed to build kept collapsing.
Many of the textbooks he was reading through (K-6 level books) were using the pedagogical technique of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children , where one purposefully gives inaccurate-but-simple information, planning to supplant it later with more accurate accounts once a foundational knowledge of the terms and laws of the system have been built within the student's mind. Both the misconceptions he is addressing, and his own misconceptions, show that this technique is more dangerous than it is believed to be, because people keep these inaccurate accounts, resisting learning the more complex but real accounts due to some bastardized version of Occam's razor.