Introduction. The main idea of the article is that every established educational strategy combines the incompatible, generating economocentrism, political centrism, technocentrism, ecocentrism and other “centrisms” that lead to a reductivist approach to the meaning and forms of education. Theoretical analysis. Education as a socioanthropological institution is relatively autonomous, and the idea of autopoiesis of the human being is what lies at the foundation of its autonomy. In this context, philosophy of education appears as a philosophy of its age, or, even broader, a philosophy of human beings who are able not only to integrate themselves into the civilizational design of the epoch with its cultural and historical standards, and professional needs, but also to transcend their epoch in search for themselves / their own. Empirical analysis. The inalienable mission of education consists in creating a social field for spiritual maturation and self-perfection for individual human beings. Education acquires its completeness and dignity only when it reaches the level of navigating a person towards development, “the care of the self”. Conclusion. Education thus becomes a form of development of a civil society, able to self-organize and self-develop, to create (cultivating meanings and institutions), which is not reducible to a social “conveyor-factory” for producing semi-finished products according to the standards of political, professional or sociocultural institutions.