At the beginning of 2012, the world population surpassed 7 billion with people under the age of 30 accounting for more than half of this number (50.5%). According to the survey, 89.7% of people under 30 lived in emerging and developing economies, particularly in the Middle East and Africa.

http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/events/prizes-and-celebrations/celebrations/international-days/world-radio-day-2013/statistics-on-youth/

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Part of class on Thursday will be spent clarifying the ways that we can think about Youth. First and foremost, as is asserted above, Youth represents both a concrete social category– one that has both subjective and objective (structural) aspects– and an abstract concept that forms the basis of a whole bundle of cultural values and associations. In addition, we can conceive of Youth in biological and temporal terms. While the physical development of humans hasn’t changed much over thousands of years, the social meaning of the human physical development has. In other words, there have always been children and young people, but childhood and Youth as social categories haven’t always been conceived of in the way that they are today.