But as someone who's been writing manuals for the past 33 years I have to ask ... how much real-world diving expertise do the folks who design the classes and write the instructional manuals have? It's one thing to know how to create a curriculum ... it's another altogether to understand the target audience well enough to understand not just how they need to learn it, but what they need to know.
The reference was to the instructional approach, not to the content. The person who posited the position said that the curriculum was designed by marketing people rather than educators, which was not true.
I was the chief designer of a foreign language instructional program teaching Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese that won the 2007 award for innovative instructional design for the United States Distance Learning Association. I know a little French, but precious little of the other languages. Curriculum design and content are two different things.
There are ... in a lot of scuba diving text I've read ... things that make me go "huh?" ... not because the book is poorly written, or even necessarily incorrect ... but somehow just seems inconsistent, out of context or simply irrelevent to diving as I've experienced it.
Again, that would be the problem with the content expert who is creating the curriclum. The curriculum designer has nothing to do with that. The curriculum designer is responsible for the shape of the curriculum and the strategies used to teach it. A content expert (in curriculum design they are called SMEs, or Subject Matter Experts) follows that pattern and inserts the proper instructional content.
As an example ... Jeppesen's Open Water Sport Diver manual (5th edition) ... "The frog kick is not commonly used in scuba diving, but is good for providing a restful variation in kicks on long surface swims" ...
My understanding is that the author of that manual ... Lou Fead ... is one of the legends of underwater instructional curriculum ...
And after we developed a downright outstanding Mandarin Chinese program following the principles I created, we learned that the native speaker we used for recordings had a strong southern accent, so we had to redo all the recordings. That is not the fault of the instructional design, and that was not the point of the original post.
By the way, I frog kick primarily when I dive, but I doubt if 2% of the other divers I have encountered in resort diving do.