In the article the author discusses the relationship between education and socio-cultural needs. The socio – cultural reality is the reality of a permanent change. It is difficult to describe and even more difficult to understand. The specific character of qualitatively new changes in the relations between globality and locality implies a completely new perception of reality, ways of interpreting the world, and a new quality of judgments about the condition of the modern man. This reality is also a ”multiplicity of worlds”, which means a large number of possibilities to create oneself. What individuals perceive as their ”own” has the biggest developmental potential when it is worked out on the proactivity path. proactive people are distinguished by interrelated features: the search for a possibility of change (the environment examination, going beyond limitations of a given situation), establishing effective and change oriented goals (opening new paths of action), foreseeing problems and remedia measures (the analysis of one’s own achievements, looking for signals of threats or dangers), looking for new ways of achieving goals (the ambition is to make a new tradition).