Multicultural upbringing: N.Y. Sinyagina, Doctor of Psychological Science, Professor, Director of the Federal State Scientific Institution “Research Centre for Upbringing Problems, Healthy Way of Life Formation, Drug Addiction Preventing and Children and Youth Social and Pedagogical Support”, Moscow, Russia Moscow - London, 2011 a response to the modern society threats

Today is a high day, but I would like to speak about everyday life. The life being lived by the majority of people with fear. Someone is afraid of loneliness, someone is afraid of losing the loved ones because of illness. One 13-year-old girl, who attempted suicide, wrote in her diary not long before it: “I don't want to live. I'm afraid to live, afraid to get under a car, I'm afraid to get a bad mark, afraid of parents, ashamed of friends and girlfriends, very afraid of act of terrorism... I don't want to live”. “I don't want to live”.

A lot of people today are afraid of actions of other people, people of a different nationality, or religious faith. In any place of the world there is a very high probability to get in the act of terrorism, to meet with extremism, to get involved in the national conflict. Why do some people want to live peacefully and quietly, while others bring destruction and fear? The Chinese enlightener Xun Zi understood it as follows: “The newborn babies cry everywhere the same way, when they grow up, they have different habits. It is the result of upbringing ”.

All of us are responsible for upbringing – it were someone's children who captured Beslan and led to numerous victims, it were someone’s pupils who committed terrorist attacks in London, Madrid, New York, and these are someone's neighbors provoking armed ethnic conflicts. People of different nationalities and faith must unite in the name of reason triumph, in the name of mankind prosperity and such integration can be based on the multicultural education (In Russia, the authors of the concept of multicultural education – R. Bzarov, T. Kambolov, A. Levitskaya). I want to say that the fear and violence can be conquered by means of a constructive collaboration, compromise, and upbringing of our own children in the spirit of peace and tolerance. I wish all of us to understand it and to set heart on it!