"To save science, try celebrating 'high quality ignorance'"

From ars technica:

What scientists actually do is think about what they don’t know. “The ignorance is what’s missing” from public discussions of science, Firestein told the crowd. As a word, “ignorance” is potentially provocative, so he clarified. Firestein means "ignorance" in the sense that science focuses on recognizing and studying communal gaps in knowledge (rather than lauding the village idiot). This is the exciting part of science: “the boundary just outside the facts.”

Basically the piece is arguing that one of the things that turns people off science is how science education often focuses on accumulating a large body of facts rather than exploration of the boundaries of knowledge.

Of course, you do need a certain base of knowledge to explore some areas further, but if you could build that base up in a more-exploratory fashion perhaps that might help.