Unlike say, physics, there is a big shortage of over-arching theories in chemistry. The field (in my experience of it, at least; about 5 semesters' worth) is mo

Unlike say, physics, there is a big shortage of over-arching theories in chemistry. The field (in my experience of it, at least; about 5 semesters' worth) is mostly a collection of ad-hoc rules, with many exceptions and special cases. So I think the historical approach is more or less necessary for teaching these fields. It works the same way as when bootstrapping a computer, where you have to load a bunch of fake "operating systems" (e.g. BIOS, Grub, early stages of init daemon) before you can run the latest version of the "real" OS. And after that, you will still progress mostly by patches.