Historical and socio-philosophical approaches to the analysis of civic education evolution over 2,500+ years of European history provide heuristic lessons for our present. The seven «historical contexts» proposed by the author organize closed, although related to each other, spatial, temporal, cultural and political boundaries of understanding the strategies of transmitting civic meanings, values and norms to a person, and allow us to compare the specifics of different didactic models, and civic qualities and practices corresponding to the challenges of their time.
Today, the author considers the price of a mistake unprecedently high for a country choosing authentic strategies of «educating a citizen», which would be able to minimize the natural desire of the authorities to form a citizen in their own interests and focus on the interests of future generations, cultivating an autonomous and independent civic state of a «man of the world».