Shaping the multicultural competences of high school students

The development of a multicultural world is a unique, complex and contradictory process. People, who have for centuries had a psychological structure of distinctions "mine - alien", "I - not me", are not always prepared to live and work peacefully and productively in a multi-ethnic environment. One of the world's ethnically unstable regions is Russia, which is traditionally home to over 120 peoples and nationalities. This number increased markedly in the 1990s due to the influx of refugees from the former Soviet republics seeking employment in Russian cities and villages. Labour migration processes are now leading to a significant increase in the number of different ethnic groups even in those regions of Russia that have not traditionally been characterised by cultural and ethnic diversity. The growing global public awareness of the growing contradiction between the increasing level of multi-ethnicity of the social environment in which people live and work, and the unpreparedness of the global community to the changing living conditions has brought to the forefront in the context of justifying the strategic directions of education development the creation of conditions for the formation and development of multicultural competencies of the younger generations.