Which Way Does the Staircase Go?

So I know there's been a lot of debate about kids' lack of effort, how apathetic they are and how teachers don't push them enough. Sometimes I find myself thinking "well back in my day, everybody worked hard and teachers pushed us and held us to high expectations and we had to to school walk up hill in the snow both ways!"
Anyway, I read Up the Down Staricase for my multi-genre book and it taught me something. Despite politics and social climates, teenagers thirty years ago were pretty much the same as teenagers twenty years ago were pretty much the same as teens ten years ago were pretty much the same as teens five years ago, ect...Bel Kauffman does a fantastic job of capturing the teenage voice, and what I noticed was that the kids she's writing about sound exactly the same as my kids in field. Keep in mind she wrote this in the sixties. I guess what I'm saying is that despite conventional wisdom, kids aren't progressively getting dumber...what with the hippity-hop music and their nintendos and the myface. They're actually pretty much the same kids they were forty years ago...a hundred years ago...a thousand years ago! (I'm guessing).
I sometimes feel discouraged when I read how horrible some student writings can be. But this isn't a new thing. As Kauffman portrays it, none of her students really had a fantastic grasp of the English language. And as I see it, none of the kids in my Career Comm class do either. I think mainly this reflects on the widening gap between us teachers and the kids. It may not be that they're complete dunces; maybe we've just gotten a little smarter. (ps. did I use that semicolon right?)