The article deals with the Russian and world trends noted in the modern philosophy of education, which prevent the state institutions from fulfilling the function of forming the political self-consciousness of citizens through the educational system. The features of the role of a person and the state in political education are also revealed from the point of view of political thinkers and philosophers of the 18th-19th centuries, representing both conservative and liberal concepts. The author notes that conservatives have always emphasized the positive role of the state in shaping a person, due to the imperfection of human nature. Liberals, on the contrary, came to the idea of the imperfection of the state and the need to make it, like a person, an object of political education.