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This paper aims to explore the multicultural education strategies employed by primary school teachers in Georgia.

In-depth interviews with 65 primary school teachers were used. The interviews were analyzed using the theoretical framework of multicultural educational approaches defined by James Banks. The approaches used by Georgian teachers were classified into four approaches to multicultural education: contributions, additive, transformation and social action approaches.

The research revealed that the majority of teachers use the contributions and additive approaches to multicultural education. The use of the transformation approach by teachers is very rare and only happens if school textbooks, as well as exercises and assignments in the textbooks, provide this opportunity. The social action approach to multicultural education has not been used in primary grades in Georgia. The research revealed that some teachers reject diversity in their classroom as well as the necessity of developing their students’ intercultural sensitivity. These teachers have an informed and conscious approach to not using multicultural approaches in the teaching process. This approach is named by the author as the “inactive action approach”, which is specific to Georgia and is widely used in primary school classes.

The study has scientific and practical importance. The findings of this study also have practical importance. They can be used for the implementation of teacher education and training programs in Georgia. Consideration of these findings will contribute to the implementation of the National Objectives of General Education and the National Curriculum of Georgia.

This study makes contribution to the development of the field of multicultural education in Georgia.

Our personal behaviour reconciles and balances the various pressures and motivations to action which we experience. These arise within ourselves from our personal characteristics and qualities, but are externally influenced by our relationships with others, by our membership of various social groups, and by the physical environment. It is a continuing process; behaviour on one occasion, in one situation, lands us in another situation, with new pressures and motivations to be balanced by further behaviour.

This chapter focuses on the question: What is Humanism? The chapter discusses definitions of Humanism. It synthesises such definitions in order to provide a philosophical understanding of Humanism. This understanding has epistemological, ontological and axiological dimensions. The chapter points out that Humanism is transcultural. Common objections to Humanism are discussed by engaging with the works of the historian Yuval Noah Harari. Based on the general understanding of Humanism, the approach of Radical Humanism is introduced. Radical Humanism is a particular form of Humanism. Its epistemological, ontological and axiological aspects are outlined. The chapter discusses four examples approaches of Radical Humanism (Karl Marx, Erich Fromm, Wang Ruoshui, David Harvey).

This chapter is a reflection on the digital mediation of death and dying in the COVID-19 pandemic from a critical political economy perspective. It asks: What is the role of the communication of death and dying in capitalist society? How has communication with dying loved ones changed in the COVID-19 pandemic? What roles have digital technologies and capitalism played in this context?

Building on foundational theoretical insights into the role of death and dying in capitalism, this essay presents some empirical studies of death and dying in society and the COVID-19 pandemic and interprets their findings from a Communication Studies perspective.

In capitalist societies, death and dying are taboo topics and are hidden, invisible and institutionalised. The COVID-19 pandemic had contradictory effects on the role of death in society. It is a human, cultural and societal universal that humans want to die in company with loved ones. The presented empirical studies confirm the insights of the philosophers Kwasi Wiredu and Jürgen Habermas that humans are fundamentally social and communicative beings from the cradle to the grave. The wish to die in a social manner derives from humans' social and communicative nature. In capitalism, the reality of dying diverges from the ideal of dying. Capitalism hides, individualises, makes invisible and institutionalises death and dying.

The analysed studies confirm the insights of the philosophers Kwasi Wiredu and Jürgen Habermas that humans are fundamentally social and communicative beings from the cradle to the grave. Building and going beyond the works of the political theorist and philosopher Achille Mbembe and the philosopher and sociologist Erich Fromm, the essay introduces the notion of capitalist necropower. It is shown how the COVID-19 pandemic in many cases destroyed the social and communicative nature of human beings and how capitalist necropower created unnecessary surplus deaths and formed the context of the digital mediation of communication with dying loved ones in the pandemic.

This chapter presents an attempt to understand why mediation has gained so much popularity in the western world in the past three decades. I demonstrate how mediation, of all the processes that have sprung under the umbrella of the ADR movement, responds to some basic human needs and offers a way to thoroughly deal with authoritarian tendencies and patterns common, too common, in modern everyday life. A wider understanding of these needs can help emphasize the added values of the mediation process as a profound alternative to the legal proceedings as a mechanism for transforming disputes.

The fall of the Soviet Union and the end of socialism has come as a surprise but has been hailed nearly all over the world. The failure of the socialist model seems to have shown the superiority of the capitalist approach. The first sentence of Erich Fromms famous work “The Sane Society”, written at the end of the Second World War, is not strong enough to stimulate a discussion any longer. It is not less true nowadays than it was some forty years ago: “Nothing is more common than the idea that we, the people living in the Western world of the twentieth century, are eminently sane”.

Following Lakatos' strategy of a rational reconstruction of science, I present a concrete example of the rise and decline of a research program from the history of the social sciences: the authoritarian character studies of the Frankfurt School. The first version of the authoritarian character studies of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research was based on a Marxist social and psychoanalytic theory, and included an initial empirical survey. The preliminary results of this survey motivated the Institute's just-in-time emigration from Germany in 1932, and at the same time do not fit into the later theory of the authoritarian character (1936). The second version of the authoritarian character studies (1950) gained the status of a social psychological paradigm, but soon turned into a declining research program, which came to a complete stop around 1968 as far as the Institute of Social Research was concerned. Internal and external factors combined to bring about the sudden end of the authoritarian character studies.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.