It's not the stupidity of children which is in question so much as the way their experience is filtered. Unless a book, film, toy or experience is explicitly aimed at their incompletely-formed pleasure-centres, it simply does not exist and they have no curiosity about it.
Nail on head, nutshell, etc.
But it's how this mindset is acquired that is important. My daughter knew how to turn on my smartphone and make it play her favourite videos at a very young age, but last night when I was patiently tuning a short-wave radio she was very interested in what each of the buttons did, why the numbers kept changing and what the long aerial was. Clearly the mission is to nurture and expand this natural curiosity.
The rule at Yith Towers is pretty much: TV, computer, phone only when supervised; she is never left unattended with one, so screen time is regulated. There's a point at which parents make a conscious decision to take the path of least resistance and allow phones to replace interaction with the other people in the room (or often the other room). What's weird is that you go to a dinner party or whatever and you find a roomful of kids, each with his own device, not interacting with one another at all (the fact is compounded by the fact that Miss Yith is the youngest of the children in our family and circle of friends and this malady gets worse with age). Well, that's not tolerated for long: I'll pluck her out and suggest a walk to the shop or some other diversion--I'd rather be a Nazi than father to a zombie. I used to complain about how my own over-active father would drag us the length and breadth of the country on family trips and have us go on country walks to poke around churches, old houses and castles, but, now I'm mature enough to appreciate the wider picture, I realise that such a childhood was a gift
Beyond technology, as poozler illustrates, it isn't only children becoming increasingly incurious--adults, too, are sinking into their own cluster of compartments, and society is fragmenting as a result. There have always been opaque barriers of class, wealth and education that stifled mutual understanding, but at the same as these traditional fissures are deepening, new ones are appearing: politics, of course, but also housing, faith, health, experience of crime; it's not so much 'Two Nations' as it is
dozens of nations that know not one another. Part of this process is a greater sequestration in the present; not only are people less interested in the past, but they seem not to dream of possible futures with such vividness. There are visionaries dragging us forward, but it's in spite of a more general myopia.