One of the most important characteristics of human culture is that it can only be learned, not acquired through heredity. This determines that human culture has an inseparable relationship with human education from the day it came into being. In the early ancestors of human beings, education integrated with the production and life of human society transmitted primitive culture through oral and behavioral teaching. With the development of human society and the enrichment of human culture, especially due to the appearance of words, human culture can no longer be competent only by oral and behavioral communication, and human society needs institutions specializing in teaching culture. At this time, school education came into being. Education spreads culture, so that the new generation can have the cultural wealth created by human beings quickly, economically and efficiently. Make a person from a "natural person" without cultural content into a "cultural person" with cultural appreciation and cultural creation ability. If human culture is not passed from the previous generation to the next generation, the preservation, accumulation and development of human culture will become impossible. If the new generation repeats what the predecessors have experienced, it will be impossible for human beings to evolve and stay in the ignorant era of knotting and recording stories forever. As far as the whole human being with alternating generations is concerned, human beings are the creators and inheritors of culture. As far as each generation is concerned, people are the inheritors of culture first, and then the creators of culture. "People create their own history, but not at will, but under the conditions of direct encounter, which is established and inherited from the past." [1] Only when you have culture can you create culture.

Second, select the function.

Education is a purposeful, planned and systematic process of cultivating people. This process is inseparable from clear educational content. The process of determining the content of education is actually the process of choosing culture. The reason why the content of education needs to be "determined" is that with the development of the times, any culture contains advanced and backward, lofty and humble, elegant and rude elements. As a purposeful cultural value guidance, school education needs to extract the essence of culture, compile teaching materials and provide the educated with ideas, attitudes, values, behavior patterns, knowledge and skills that adapt to the development and changes of social life; Second, because the physical and mental development of teenagers as educational objects has certain laws, the development of people's cognitive ability and moral practice ability has a process, which must be considered when determining the educational content; In addition, the limitation of human brain capacity and the infinity of human cultural knowledge constitute a pair of contradictions, and education can not pass all human cultural knowledge to the educated in a certain period of time, so it is necessary to determine the educational content. The choice of culture in school education can also be realized through the choice of teachers. Because "the true nature and direction of the school is not determined by local organizations and good wishes, nor by the resolution of the student Committee." Nor is it determined by the' educational syllabus'. But decided by the teaching staff "[2]. When Mr. Cai Yuanpei was the president of Peking University, he implemented the policy of "academic freedom" and "inclusiveness". Therefore, at Peking University at that time, there were both professors of Marxism, propagandists of bourgeois theory and propagandists of China's traditional Confucianism. This is essentially that teachers are using education to choose culture. In the historical period when many cultural concepts conflict, the choice of culture by education is particularly obvious and important. For example, in today's social and cultural concepts, besides the dominant socialist and communist cultural concepts, there are also feudal cultural concepts, western cultural concepts and semi-colonial and semi-feudal cultural concepts. Cultural concept of capitalism. What kind of cultural concepts are spread and transmitted, the significance of our educational choice function is more important and prominent.

Third, innovative functions.

Education is not only to convey the inherent culture, but also to strive for renewal and innovation in the existing old culture of mankind with the development of the times and social changes. Make it adapt to the new social environment. In order to survive and develop, human beings must constantly create and update their own culture. It is through education that human beings internalize the existing cultural wealth into the spiritual wealth of the educated individuals, cultivate and bring up their personality and creativity related to cultural development, and make the culture develop and update. Through education, the new generation can share and occupy the essence of human culture quickly and effectively, and then they can stand on the shoulders of their predecessors and make new creations. Therefore, education as a means of transmitting human culture. Not only has the function of preserving culture. At the same time, it also has the functions of "cultural reproduction", development and renewal of culture. In other words, the transmission of culture through education is essentially a process of "cultural transplantation", "cultural proliferation" and cultural reproduction. And this reproductive process. It is an economic, efficient, imitative and acceptable process of expanded reproduction, but a process of continuous restructuring and construction. In his book Steps of Thought Ecology, anthropologist Grikuri batson emphasized such a viewpoint: "Culture itself is complex, and the process of learning culture is also complex. In a sense, each generation has its own culture and has reorganized its own culture. "