General education is an effective way to realize quality-oriented education, with distinctive characteristics of value shaping and compound talents training. General education runs through the whole process of university education. It cultivates students' comprehensive qualities such as humanistic cultivation, moral sentiment and social responsibility by virtue of moral cultivation. In the process of promoting general education, science and engineering universities face with a series of problems, which are mainly reflected in the course teaching management system, top-level design, teacher staff construction, contradiction between general education and professional education, teaching methods, and so on. General education focuses on "education" rather than "teaching". Taking the general education course for civil engineering-subway culture ramble as an example, the teaching mode of general education courses in science and engineering colleges are explored, and the teaching system with "research", "discussion", "practice", "training" and "verification" is built, so as to achieve the purpose of general education. The general education of science and engineering colleges should build a "student-centered" curriculum system with integration of general education and professional education, based on their subject characteristics and resource advantages, and the concept of education should be integrated into the whole process of course teaching. At the same time, the construction of general education courses needs the help of "internet +" technology and big data management to achieve the purpose of educating students.