The decision-making of ideological and political education refers to the process of comparing several feasible schemes to achieve the goal of ideological and political education and making the best choice, including the decision-making of establishing the correct goal, optimizing the choice of the scheme to achieve the goal and the decision-making scheme that can be put into practice. The decision-making of ideological and political education is a flexible decision-making and a dynamic process with forward-looking and clear value orientation, which should follow five principles: purpose principle, integrity principle, relevance principle, forward-looking principle and adjustability principle.

Decision-making can be divided into strategic decision-making and tactical decision-making according to its scope of action and influence. Strategic decision-making is a macro-decision that determines the development direction of ideological and political education and solves major overall problems. Tactical decision-making is a decision to solve local or specific problems in the process of ideological and political education. Compared with strategic decision-making, tactical decision-making is a kind of micro-decision-making, which has the characteristics of small scope, short time and execution. The relationship between strategic decision-making and tactical decision-making reflects the dialectical relationship between global decision-making and local decision-making. They are both different and related.

According to the different forms of problem solving, decision-making can be divided into normative decision-making and non-normative decision-making Normative decision-making is a decision-making to solve the ideological and cognitive problems that often recur. For this kind of problem, we can solve it according to routine, that is, according to well-known principles or relatively certain procedures, which is also called procedural decision-making and routine decision-making. Unconventional decision-making is a decision to solve the new situation and new problems that appear for the first time. To deal with this kind of problems, we should not only follow past experience, conventional systems and methods, but also study new situations, solve new problems and set new goals. Also known as non-procedural decision-making or unconventional decision-making.

In addition, the decision-making methods of ideological and political education include deterministic decision-making and risk decision-making, group decision-making and individual decision-making. The former is divided according to the different decision-making conditions and action results, while the latter is divided according to whether the decision-making subject is a group or an individual.

The decision-making procedure of ideological and political education mainly includes four aspects: determining the content and objectives, proposing feasible schemes, evaluating and optimizing schemes, and organizing the implementation of schemes.