Teaching is the most basic means to form moral concepts and cultivate moral quality, emphasizing that moral education should be based on knowledge education; Moral education should be carried out through teaching, and the purpose of teaching is to cultivate students' virtue.

The unity of knowledge, intention and action in the teaching process is also called mastering knowledge and cultivating ideological and moral character, which is referred to as education law for short. Herbart's words reflect the educational viewpoint of teaching.

In the process of teaching, students' knowledge, emotion and will interact and interfere with each other at the same time, which requires dealing with the relationship between knowledge learning and the cultivation of thought, emotion and will. Herbart believes that reason, emotion and will are all produced on the basis of knowledge, and teaching is the basic way to form people's moral quality. He advocates that knowledge cultivation and personality growth should be unified in the teaching process.

Herbart divides the teaching process into four stages:

(1) clear-clear perception textbook;

(2) Association-let students associate new knowledge with old knowledge;

(3) system-knowing that students generalize and summarize on the basis of old and new knowledge;

(4) Methods-Guide students to apply what they have learned.