Crisis? What crisis?

After a week away at conference I took Marshall McLuhan's advice and resorted to pattern recognition to make sense of my overloaded Bloglines subscriptions. I’ve talked about crises in science education before so I thought I would comment on a related pattern which caught my eye.

In the UK the BBC reports that science student numbers are declining and at the same time (via Joanne Jacobs) Christie Davies questions, with his tongue firmly in his cheek, the relevancy of science.

Science is more than a collection of facts to be memorised, it is a powerful and useful lens with which to view the world. Herein lies the problem; we often teach science as a series of unrelated facts. To quote from Lugi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author:

But a fact is like a sack. When it's empty it won't stand up. And in order to make it stand up you must first pour into it all the reasons and all the feelings that have caused it to exist.

Our science teaching is too much like a limp sack for my liking. How then do we inject reason and feeling into our teaching?