There are many reasons to this outcome that you associate with being a pansy.
On a psychological aspect, perhaps modern teachers reflect on the stress put on them over the limitations that their teachers put on them, and are making sure that they won't turn into the thing that they'd for so long associated subconsciously with suffering (trusted the memories of childhood carry for so long).
This may work to the opposite effect, however, for I've seen teachers that are somewhat strict, though most of the time, they were quite stupid about it and lacked reason in most of their commands. Though I get your opinion is that whether a teacher's reason is just or not doesn't allow a student to dismiss a teacher's duty. To get back onto the topic of this paragraph, the opposite may be true because teachers want to take out the pent up pain accumulated over years of schooling on students, but releasing stress in such a way leads ones actions to be irrational, and this irrationality actually hurts their cause, for in children's eyes, it reduces teacher's credibility as a whole.
A final possibility is that teachers have come to the conclusion of "I can't fight off the inevitable, so I might as well adapt to it as best as I can." Students now are exposed to a lot more privileges than the generations before them, and can easily access these privileges. Students have mentally adjusted to this idea that it's easy to get what you want, and therefore behave in such manners; all they have to do is say "Screw working, let's go do some other shit." and then proceed to do such without facing the consequences...until that D grade comes for them in the mail at the end of the semester. Some teachers see this trend rising, and just try to adapt to it, whether it's to take advantage of this by in turn making their work easier (therefore making grading easier). I find this is the case with the foreign language department, mostly.
In general, I think that if students are going to waste the opportunity, then it's useless for states to pay so much for all of these programs, and only offer things like language to those that want to learn it, without slapping a foreign language requirement. In a sense, I share a bit of an opinion with the teachers that have pretty much given up, but I'd rather do something about it than take advantage of it, but what else will greedy humans do.
Now, if you've read through this entire rant, consider yourselves lucky, for you're the last of those with enough attention spans to read the equivalent of an editorial.
To be honest, I wouldn't have bothered to read this Great Wall of Text if this were written by someone else.
