The rapid progress in science, engineering and technology, undoubtedly, has an impact on the policy of modern education: it is more active today and responds more vigorously to everything new. The nature of human development, however, has its characteristics, requires caution and scientific study of the impact of social context and social reforms on the lives of children and adolescents, on the development of their thinking, on their actions and relationships. The paper aims to show the relevance of addressing the values and meanings of modern education, analyze the ideas of education reform, determine their nature and reasonableness (from the viewpoint of sociology, pedagogy and psychology), and to identify the factors that caused negative manifestations in education. The methods used in the study are a generalizing analysis of scientific and methodological literature on the issues of modern education, and the study of the concepts and research views, which change educational traditions. The results of the research. The study has identified some viewpoints (as trends of education in modern context) on the following issues: - “project education” focusing on a kind of pedagogical “self-order”, based on which a “probabilistic model of social and individual behavior” is built; - the transition from the discourse of collectivism to the discourse of self-care, - personal growth and rise to the freedom, - the new virtual reality is the cause of another way of thinking, impulsive behavior, orientation towards achieving quick individual success, and others. Discussion and conclusion. The analysis of the theory allows us to conclude that social reforms and technological progress have significantly changed the conditions, lifestyle and value orientations in the field of education. The time for the introduction of a new culture of relations between generations is accelerating, the perception of reality is changing, and the periods of social development of children and adolescents are shortening. All these factors cause the need to find the ideal correlation between the time and objectives of education to preserve the “national cultural code” with its unchanged traditional foundations for the development of the “inner man.”