For a long time, some people have been saying that China's education system hampers students' innovative capability and does not prepare them for the practical problems of the real world. But this view is not true. And the Nobel Prize should not be taken as the yardstick of a country's innovative capability, because it is not only about education and factors such as management and finance complicate the award's mechanism.

In fact, China's achievement in basic education is exemplary. Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in December showed the 15-year-old students from Shanghai secured the top ranks in reading, mathematics and science in the world. The performance of students from the US, where the per capita GDP is three times that of Shanghai, was much below their Shanghai counterparts and just equal to the average in OECD countries.

Though the standard of education in Shanghai is higher than in most parts of China, the country has made great progress in education reform and Chinese mothers have played an important role in the process by setting high standards for their children.

It is common knowledge that overseas Chinese who follow traditional Chinese education concepts excel in academic fields. US statistics show that Chinese Americans account for only 5 percent of the US population but 20 percent of the students in Ivy League schools. Besides, one-third of the US Intel Science Talent Search awardees in 2010 were Chinese American competitors.

Likewise, Chinese Canadians account for more than one-third of the students in Canada's two most famous universities, Toronto University and the University of British Columbia.

Influenced by Confucius' teachings, students from the Republic of Korea and Japan are also excelling in academic fields. Their success owes in no small measure to their parents, especially their mothers, who make their children study more seriously and spend more money on their education.

Indeed, research in education in China shows that to secure good scores and ranking, students have to spend more time and energy on studies, which probably is a test of their self-discipline. In this sense, a mother's supervision is of vital importance.

Soon after the PISA report was published, Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology sent officials to China to study it with China's National Institute for Education Research. Tokyo's move shows that Japanese educators are also worried about their students' performance. Over the past decade, Tokyo has loosened its education policies, because of which Japanese students have been slipping steadily in international rankings.

Viewed in this light, Chinese parents have played a very important role in reforming the country's education system, and will continue to do so.

The author is a research scholar with the China National Institute for Education Research, affiliated to the Ministry of Education.