I don't think that this statement is correct (the quote on Wikipedia, not your conclusion).
Educators do indeed employ lies-to-children with the intention of deception in many cases. It's not the primary intention, but it is still intentional deception.
In some cases, there is no intention to deceive (e.g. when a teacher immediately explains that 'what I'm teaching you is an intentional oversimplification, and is not completely correct'), but in many cases, educators leave this to the teacher who needs to teach the newer, more correct model later. This is especially true at a young age.
> the authors acknowledge that some people might dispute the applicability of the term lie, while defending it on the grounds that "it is for the best possible reasons, but it is still a lie".
The models that they call "lie" are, in fact, mostly correct, they are good approximations, with limited scope, and sometimes don't handle edge cases, the same with Newton's gravity and many topics.
The same way that Pi is not 3.14159, nor it is 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286, and it's not a lie, just an approximation.
Yeah, I agree the name is terrible. The logic that simplifications of complex topics are "lies" essentially makes every part of human knowledge a lie - which makes it a meaningless term.
Ultimately every single thing you think you understand ends at an approximation or a simplification. That's just the nature of the world. It's not a lie - it's just a simpler abstraction of the underlying truth.
The entire field of engineering is based on creating simple models of things and using them to build complex things. Every engineering class is pre-empted with "these equations are simplified approximations of how things work in the real world, but they're good enough for designing things". Those aren't lies - just useful tools.
Then they're not lies. Nor are jokes, fiction, or any other perceived-to-be-untruths not intended to deceive.