As a method of school moral education, self-education requires educators to give appropriate guidance according to the physical and mental development stages of the educated, give full play to the consciousness and enthusiasm of the educated in improving their ideological and moral character, and turn the demands of the educated into their own efforts. It is necessary to help the educated establish a clear concept of right and wrong, be good at distinguishing between true and false, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, encourage them to pursue truth, goodness and beauty, and oppose falsehood, evil and ugliness. We should cultivate the ability of self-knowledge, self-monitoring and self-evaluation, be good at affirming and persisting in our correct thoughts and behaviors, and be brave in denying and correcting our wrong thoughts and behaviors. We should guide the educated to learn to take criticism and self-criticism as the methods of self-education (see criticism and self-criticism).

Self-cultivation means self-cultivation and striving to improve one's ideological and moral cultivation. Taoism, Confucianism and Mohism all emphasize self-cultivation, but their contents are different. Since Confucius, Confucianism has attached great importance to self-cultivation and regarded it as one of the eight purposes of education. The Confucian standard of "self-cultivation" is mainly the principle of loyalty and forgiveness and the three cardinal principles and five permanents, which is essentially an idealistic method of self-cultivation divorced from social practice. They believe that the process of self-cultivation is: respecting things, knowing and doing, being sincere and being upright. Self-cultivation is the foundation, and family, country and the world are the goals. Therefore, through the method of "introspection", individual behavior is consistent with feudal morality, and talents are cultivated for the consolidation of its feudal rule and political power. Taoist self-cultivation requires conforming to nature; Mozi called for "unity of ambition and merit" to promote the benefits and eliminate the evils and level the world.

The former is materialism and the latter is idealism.