Chief Scientific Officer,
Laboratory for Psychology of Destructive Behaviour and Aggression of Youth, Federal
Scientific Center of Psychological and Multidisciplinary Research.
Background. The article reveals the essence and purpose of political speculation and manipulative practices used by extremist propagandists to recruit young people, whom they regard as their target resource. Students are increasingly becoming a focus of attention from representatives of both international and local extremist groups. Recently, an increase in extremist activities among students has been observed. At the same time, with traditional methods of prevention not meeting the expectations of today’s youth, new methods of pedagogical prevention require to be developed. Objectives. The goal is to identify effective approaches and methods for the pedagogical prevention of youth extremism, considering modern sociocultural contexts. Methods. A review of strategies and approaches implemented to prevent the manifestations of youth extremism in the UK, the Netherlands, France, the USA, and Russia is presented. Results. The analysis of theoretical sources and the synthesis of accumulated pedagogical experience have led to the identification of the advantages of a systemactivity approach to designing and implementing flexible preventive measures with operational variability. The following forms of work have demonstrated a certain level of effectiveness in achieving resistance to extremist propaganda: communications of public opinion leaders with target audiences; techniques of shaping consciousness; techniques influencing moral values, motives, attitudes, and forming representations, notions and ideas; compliance with the principles of flexible prevention and zero tolerance to extremism. Conclusions. The implementation of the proposed set of measures involves
a certain variability of preventive activities, depending on the specific characteristics of the target groups. At the same time, operational variations can be justified by the psychological characteristics of students and can affect the success of
an individual form of education.