The spiritual essence of the purpose of socialist education is to emphasize the common acquisition of morality, intelligence, physique and beauty from the aspect of students' due quality development, but its guiding ideology has a common feature, that is, socialist education is based on Marxist theory of all-round development of human beings, which is the inheritance, application and development of Marxist theory of all-round development under socialist historical conditions and embodies the common spiritual essence.

The most fundamental question in the purpose of education is to answer the question of who to train. Socialist workers should be new workers. "Working people should have knowledge, and intellectuals should have labor". The socialist ideal worker is a worker who combines mental labor with manual labor and is a "all-round producer". Cultivating this new type of workers is the ideal requirement of socialist education.

The directionality of educational purpose is the fundamental embodiment of educational essence. Education in class society has always been class-oriented, and the class nature of education is first reflected in the purpose of education. All the educational purposes of the exploiting classes have always tried to cover up their class nature, and their expressions have always been general and abstract, trying to say that their educational purposes serve the overall interests of society. The purpose of socialist education in China is different from that of all exploiting classes. We make no secret of our true intentions, and clearly declare that we are cultivating builders and successors of the socialist cause, not new workers.