Innovation finds frequent mention in the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20). Innovation has also become a buzzword in almost every walk of life, especially education. And innovation in the field of education means not just innovation in education, but also promotion of social innovation through education.

China's education process has been criticized for not contributing enough to social innovation. But to promote social innovation, education should first become innovative itself. Many so-called educational innovation techniques have been tried, but they only carried the tag of innovation, with some even being anti-innovation in nature.

For instance, when a kindergarten teacher assigns "innovative" homework to 4-year-old children, requiring them to collect waste to make a television set, he/she is essentially assigning homework to their parents. Also, some schools have developed an app that allows parents to watch how a teacher teaches a class and assess their children's performance in real time. But it is actually a kind of monitoring and surveillance, not innovative interaction.