The research deals with a problem of existence and development of educational paradigms in the history of European culture. Thus, Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the New and Modern times are original epochs that created within themselves original educational paradigms, corresponding to their historical specifics. They reproduced themselves through educational paradigms as stable cultural forms. According to the generally accepted division of history in the epochs mentioned above, the authors consider the educational paradigms corresponding to them intuitive-discursive , exegetical-apologetic , rational-experimental and existential-personological . The identified educational paradigms are determined by the duality of the methods used in them (intuition and discourse, exegesis and apology, experiment and rationality). The noted methods are related by a horizontal and vertical scale, demonstrating the continuity of historical methods of the social reality cognition. The authors can define this study as a theoretical analysis conducted on the basis of the history of philosophy and representing a peculiar philosophy of history. The modern education can be studied both in statics considering the forms and methods of its functioning, and in dynamics - carrying out a theoretical analysis of the process of its genetic development which allows one to address the actual problems of the modern education.