"Build a country first, then educate people" should be "build a country first, then educate people", that is to say, the first priority of governing the country and protecting the people is to promote moral education.

"Building the country and governing the people, teaching first" comes from the Book of Rites, which means that moral education is the most important thing.

This sentence means that to build a country and govern the people, we must first establish learning and teaching. Paying attention to national moral education is the core of national development. We should combine the characteristics and experience of traditional moral education in China, and carry out teaching education suitable for contemporary China people according to the current national conditions and social reality.

Education must serve socialist modernization and be combined with productive labor to cultivate builders and successors of socialist cause with all-round development in morality, intelligence and physique.