I highly doubt teens now are any more intellegent than teens 50 years ago. They may posess different types of knowledge or more knowledge than teens 50 years ago but that has everything to do with the type of technology today nothing to do with intellegence. 50 years ago people couldnt rely on calculators as there prolly were none and had to do all their math (even the hard stuff) in their head or on paper. Personally i think teens are a lot more disrespectful now than teens even 10 years ago, because they are allowed to get away with more. Where i work, i deal with customers on a daily basis, and we are required to treat each customer politely and respectfully yet its more often than not the teens that treat us disrespectfully rather than the adults. Perhaps its the lack of a smack now and then that results in such disrespect, violence and bad language. Of course a large amount of that has to do with movies, video games and internet access. Afterall the occasional smack on the bottom never hurt anybody. I know because my parents smacked my brothers and I occasionally when we did something that diserved it and it worked a lot better than grounding us or sending us to our rooms. And even tho we did get smacked occasionally when we diserved it my parents did respect us AND our intellegence.
Anyway... just my thoughts.