I can't say why this situation played out this way, however I have been saying that as we create a society with less and less respect for elders, and authority these things happen. Add an overinflated sense of importance, and entitlement, and you create a society of people who don't recognize the importance of other's instructions, and therefore the validity, or the seriousness those instructions.
Keep up with what we have been doing to our children, and the fabric of our society, and the documentary Idiocracy will happen much sooner than 500 years in the future.