At any time, education plays a vital role in the development of society and people. The fundamental value of education lies in cultivating talents with high morality, lofty belief, honesty and law-abiding, rich knowledge and brilliant talents, and tapping human potential is to enable people to find and play their own values in society and live a healthy and fulfilling life. In the basic viewpoint of pragmatic education theory represented by Dewey, education is growth and the process of promoting instinctive growth. China's ancient educational thought holds that education can promote people's self-cultivation, govern the country with the whole family and level the world. The school of wise men in ancient Greece believed that man is the yardstick of all things, and education should be people-oriented so that people can develop harmoniously in many aspects. Moreover, education should not be to cultivate citizens for the country and society, but to cultivate people with personality different from the collective. Socrates advocates that the virtue of education is knowledge, so education should cultivate people's virtue, teach people to learn to be a virtuous person, and then teach people to learn extensive and practical knowledge and exercise. Plato believes that education should not promote personal development, but should enable everyone to find their place in society according to their own talents. In human development, education plays a positive role in guiding, inspiring, laying a foundation, reconstructing, improving, revising, perfecting, adding value and selecting human development through imparting, training, edifying and evaluating. Locke believes that education plays a decisive role in people's growth. Herbart insists on pragmatic education and thinks that traditional teaching is book knowledge that children are forced to learn from their personal life and experience. Therefore, children's experience formed in activities should be the main learning content, and attention should be paid to learning from experiments. These different educational ideas, from various specific angles, essentially explain the leading role of education in human development.
Promoting human development is the instinctive function of education, and its derivative function is the social function of education. It plays a certain role by cultivating people to enter the society and become citizens of a certain society, and plays a role in adapting, transforming and changing the maintenance and development of society. Education can be divided into school education and family education. Generally speaking, school education plays a leading role in human development. People often say that "knowledge changes fate." "The book has its own golden house, the book has its own Yan Ruyu, and the book comes from a thousand bells." Now, for most people, the most effective way to acquire knowledge is school education. The purpose of school education is very strong, and the school is an institution that specializes in cultivating people. Its activities, cultural creation and system construction are almost all around the purpose of cultivating people. School education is very systematic, which is mainly manifested in planning, organization, cooperation and comprehensiveness. School education is also highly selective and professional. Many thinkers and educators in history have affirmed the role of education in human development. Rousseau said: "The formation of plants is due to cultivation, and the formation of people is due to education." Kant said: "Man can only become a man through education, and man is the product of education." These viewpoints all affirm that education plays an extremely important role in human development.