[naasking]

> Why do we teach linguistics with messy real-world languages instead of conlangs that most clearly distill the principles we want to teach?

Because we're not teaching language science in that case, we're teaching proficiency in an actual language.

An industry language is fine for a software engineering degree, or a technician degree of some sort.

[geofft]

Just to make sure I understand you right - you're claiming that the academic discipline of linguistics is not "language science," it's "proficiency in an actual language", and a school with a "language science" program instead of a linguistics program would teach introductory language science in a conlang?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics