The article discusses relationship between school textbooks on history and principles of professional historiography. Referring to the topic of the periodization of modern and recent history, the author calls the XVI-XVII centuries as the first stage. This corresponds to the allocation of the designated centuries in the early modern history approved by professional historiography of the post-Soviet period. Discussing the stage of the post-industrial society, the author considers it necessary to overcome the “eurocentric imbalance” in the school textbook, paying attention to the countries of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The author draws attention to the desire of the authorities to exalt the Russian empire, its monarchs in the historical views of the Russians, and to recognize the collapse of the empire as a national tragedy, which was not natural but artificial. Unlike the 1990s, when the October Revolution was overthrown by authorities, today the whole revolution, including February, is declared the cause of the national tragedy. In opinion of the author the principle of historicism should be the basis of educational historical literature, which would bring it closer to professional historiography. The fundamental platform of professional historiography is historicism. It’s antithesis - presentism, equivalent to the subordination of historical interpretation to the present day - "politics, overturned into the past". This sets as an important task the development of a moral and ethical code of an unbiased and balanced attraction and presentation of the source material of the studied topic, the maximum approximation to the exact measure of contradictory and diverse historical facts.