We've created a winner-take-all society where the cost of losing is a soul-sucking micro-managed job and the constant worry that getting sick could mean medical bills that can never be paid off. In this society you do not get points for asking big questions. You get points for getting the right degrees to serve the right signaling functions to get the right jobs which offer luxuries like health insurance and the flexibility to leave the office for 15 minutes during the day to take care of an errand.

Kids aren't stupid. They tailor their behavior to the incentives they are offered. All of the author's political science students from Stanford are going to keep their head down then head to boring corporate jobs in consulting, law, or finance because those jobs pay the bills and offer health insurance. They might go and live a life of asking big questions if we lived in a country where your baby can fall and hit its head and you can take it to the ER without weighing the benefit versus the staggering cost of the ER visit, but we don't live in that kind of country. And under those circumstances only irrational people are willing to take the risk of asking big questions.