I would like to make my point clear for this, I am saying that kids today aren't curious in the making of products and the technology and mathematics behind them. If you didn't get that, I'm sorry for wasting 2 minutes of your time.
I just agree with Tom that you didn't make it very well. You had absolutely no data to back up your claims - just a handful of anecdotes (some of which were simply false).
For example, do you have any evidence to back up your claim that NASA can't find enough qualified scientists? Because I work at a DoD research lab (well, a contractor) that has no problem hiring scientists (we have multiple scientists interviewing every month, for positions in a very narrow field). Frankly, all the data I've seen says that America is graduating far too many PhDs for the number of positions available.
The key mechanism of technological advancement is abstraction. I am fairly good at the type of math that is important today, but I'd probably fare poorly in a high school math class 50 years ago. It just isn't that important, or useful, for me to be able to quickly compute an arbitrary trig function or take a complex derivative by hand. In principle, I know how to do both these things (well, I could probably derive the half angle/angle addition formulas and most of the derivative rules, although I don't actually remember them), but why would I bother when I can just abstract away irrelevant details and focus on the important stuff? And I'm sure students 50 years had lost other skills that earlier generations had deemed important.
Instead, I get to specialize - which increases my (and the world's) productivity. Nobody can truly understand how anything works these days. Even fully understanding a simple pocket calculator would require more knowledge in Metallurgy, Quantum Physics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Applied Math than anyone has.
It's just like how you build black boxes when programming. I don't know (or care about) the implementation details of Python's hash tables, Haskell's type inference, Java's garbage collector, or the web service library my coworker wrote. I have a vague, high level understanding of how they all work. But, if I ever want to get something useful done at some point I just have to take it on faith that they work.
The analogy extends beyond programming to engineering/science in general. The field of molecular biology was formulated by quantum physicists interested in applying their experimental techniques in Biology. The new emerging field of Bioinformatics was conceived by statisticians and computer scientists to apply data mining techniques to genome data. Genome sequencing itself, is a blend of EE (taken from silicon waffer design) and molecular biology.
My opinion is that if everyone relegates to their own "tower," and aren't curious to drill deep into the bits of the other fields. There will only be incremental improvement to the existing towers, and no new towers. Hence the original author's point: kids are satisfied with interacting with technology on a superficial level (many in fact have a high level understanding of how cellphones work, cell phone gets signal from wireless tower), but they aren't curious enough to dig deep into the bits (program an Android game).
My issue with your article was that your justifications were shallow while at the same time being accusatory.