The new youth in the new era needs to be cultivated from multiple perspectives including morality, intelligence, physical fitness, aesthetics and labor. The teaching mode of engineering major courses including soil mechanics focuses on cultivating talents, which ignores the morality training; it is difficult to meet the spirit of President Xi Jinping’s speech at the national conference on college ideological and political education work. Taking the course of soil mechanics as an example, this paper discusses the basic concept of the course and the necessity of construction the curriculum ideological and political education. The curriculum ideological and political reform is carried out from the following two aspects:First of all, we explore the ideological and political elements and general philosophies according to the course theories, including basic nature of soil, soil seepage issue, calculation and analysis of soil stress, soil shear strength and slope stability analysis. Secondly, we apply the theoretical knowledge to specific engineering cases and achieve inspirational ideological and political education from engineering practice. The soil mechanics teaching method based on curriculum ideological and political education proposed in this paper is expected to provide ideas for constructing the ideological and political teaching mode of the soil mechanics teaching system in the new era, thus to generate better ideological and political education effects.