Remember that video "What Most Schools Don't Teach" that had Zuckerberg, Gates, and Houston encouraging kids to learn how to program? The opening quote is from Steve Jobs that says "Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer...because it teaches you how to think."
To me, chess does the same and has since my childhood. When you first learn chess, you learn what each piece can and can't do. And after that, YOU must learn how to strategically move the pieces in a way that traps your opponent and beats him/her. It teaches you how to think strategically, both offensively and defensively...or to be able to think 4-5 steps ahead...it's a different way of thinking.
Of course, as you get more advanced, there are books and such to explain certain strategies but the world champions don't just win off the strategies in the book--they are forced to think even further outside the box if they want to have a chance of winning.
Chess is a great game to teach kids HOW to think. I'm all for this, especially in a country such as Armenia.
I've been playing chess since childhood. These days I play on and off exclusively through Fritz using their online service, of which I've been a member since inception. I have also taught my kids to play chess. They have entered local tournaments starting at age six and have nearly always come out on top. They usually have to play one or two divisions above their age grade due to the skills they have developed.
And yet, after a couple of years of them playing tournaments and taking classes from our local master I pull them out of the entire thing and only allow them to play an occasional tournament here and there for fun. Why?
Because playing lots of chess only makes you good at playing chess. Yes, you learn deep concentration, situational analysis, etc. However, these skills do not translate linearly to other activities.
Playing blitz chess does not make you better at avoiding an accident on the freeway when things get out of hand. In other words, you don't become some kind of a super-fast general-purpose thinker. You simply become really good at fast chess.
The same is true of "traditional" slow chess. Again, the skills you learn seem to be focused around the game and very little of it translates to the outside world.
There are teachings that do, for example, one mantra I repeat to my kids while learning chess and try to reinforce in other activities is: "Is there a better move?".
The other problem with chess study is the fact that in order to move past a certain level you have to become a human chess database. I personally detest that paradigm shift in the game. Yes, you have to know how to analyze the board and evaluate positions, of course you do. However, without committing to memory a huge library of openings, end games and even mid-game strategies (and specific move sequences) you simply can't get past certain thresholds. This, from my perspective, is an absolute waste of time, talent and effort that no kid should be subjected to.
Please consider this to be my opinion and only that. Don't be offended if your position is diametrically opposite mine. It's OK to disagree. Life goes on.
The first couple of years of learning chess can be fantastic if, and only if, they are used as a conduit for learning important lessons. For example, teaching kids to deal with loosing can be a part of this. Teaching them to take a situation apart to examine the pieces is critical in nearly every engineering discipline. If you don't take the time to make these connections while teaching chess then all you are doing is teaching chess. In other words, the connections will not be magically constructed by your kid simply because they can now check-mate another kid.
What should kids have a really good grasp of? Lots of things, but if I had to name three it would be Mathematics, Physics and Programming.
Math gives you the most fundamental toolset you'll need for just about everything, from balancing your checkbook to building a rocket. Very important.
Physics connects math to the real world. If taught correctly kids get a real "touch-and-feel" sense of how things work and why.
Programming, again, if taught correctly, teaches, at the most fundamental level, about problem solving. How do you take a seemingly huge problem, break it into a bunch of little components and methodically solve each one of them. And it can teach quick real-world problem analysis as well. For example, I've done things like play "if-else-then" games with my older kid where we break down the things that could happen if you place a glass too close to the edge of the table.
That said, chess is great. And, in moderation, as a conduit for learning other ideas it could be fantastic. Nothing wrong with that.
BTW, there's an interesting connection between Steve Jobs and Armenia:
Indeed. For this reason I refuse to teach chess to my children. Instead I'm teaching them go. I find that it has much simpler rules, more complex strategy, more varied games, less memorization at my level, has a good handicap system, and uses areas of your brain that chess simply doesn't.
But in the end it is a game. If they enjoy it and learn a way of thinking, great. But I will not encourage them to master it either.
I've been showing my little girl both, but I started with Go as it is the more intellectually demanding game. There is rote memorization in Go but conceptually initially it seems to require far less memorization of specific sequences. It seems to be more about spatial awareness, counting, balancing defense and attack and grabbing territory, as well as the if-this-then-that-if-the-other-then-something-else (decision trees?) that Chess has. I may have said this on this site before but I personally am saddened that Go is only just gaining mindshare in the West because it is a far superior game to Chess and I wish I had been taught it as a kid when my mind was more sponge-like. At least my kid will should be able to kick my butt one day which will delight me.
I was reminded of some cautionary voices from this: http://www.laweekly.com/1999-03-18/news/the-go-club/full/ ,
an interesting LA Weekly article (1999) about the Korean female reporter's experience at a Korean Go Club in Los Angeles (note: Go is known as Baduk in Korean):
But Go players, regardless of nationality, are mostly men — and Korean women, particularly wives and mothers, think they’re full of shit.
"You know the people who play the Baduk," my mother answered disgustedly when I asked her about the game. "They are just the lazy people who like to smoking."
My friend Mia has a more dramatic tale. One day her mom came home to find Mia’s dad teaching her and her brother Go. She immediately grabbed the kids by their shirt collars and carried them out of the room. I will not allow you to turn my children into Baduk players, she informed her husband. "She wouldn’t let us learn," Mia explained, "because Baduk sucks your life away."
(There's lots more to the piece -- if you're interested in the game and some of its sociology, check it out).
It is not only your opinion. Numerous experiments show that playing chess does not add any skills across domains. As well as any other types of simplistic gaming.
This only shows how far Armenian education system from real rationale.
This, from my perspective, is an absolute waste of time, talent and effort that no kid should be subjected to
You've hit upon something which is a Deep Truth (TM) of parenting. There is nothing wrong with a child committing to that time and effort in chess, or gymnastics, or baseball, or anything, under one condition.
That condition is that they love it. Not for the parents, not for the coaches, or for the accolades. They have to deeply love whatever it is for its own sake.
And a good reason of why chess does not translate to other activities is that probably most of the patterns that you learn in chess do not show up in other domains so you cannot really use those learned patterns in other situations.
For example, learning a new language means learning lots of new patterns. A lot of those patterns are new grammatical rules. If you were to learn a Latin derived language like Spanish then a lot of those same patterns can be re-used to learn another Latin derived language like French. With chess, unless those patterns you've learned exist in other domains then they are useless and can only be used to play chess.
One of the thing chess can do you for you is increase your memory, maybe, since as you said you need to become a chess database. The cost is probably too great and the reward too little, though.
Maybe this is a way for a tiny country to make a dent in the world's intellectual community. If you can't afford a giant linear accelerator or billion dollar telescope to make headlines, producing a few world chess champions could make you shine.
We've taught more useless things in schools... Some states want to teach creation along side evolution for instance...
The biggest problem I had as a kid was finding other people to play against. I moved from a fairly urban area to the countryside and never really found anyone else who enjoyed playing it. I only ever played for fun and was never interested in competitive play.
These days I'm mostly relegated to my own rules of drunken hyper-chess; the two players must make their move immediately after the other and the entire game is over in a couple of minutes. Drink every time a piece is taken. This is a form of chess most people seem to be able to get behind.
When the Armenian chess team returned to Yerevan as winners of the Olympiad, they were treated like rockstars outside the opera house, fireworks and all.
There are many great reasons this is good for the country:
- cheap to play
- teaches discipline & patience
- both genders can compete on level playing field
- scope for creative thinking & problem solving
In practice this doesn't seem to have happened, at least not yet (the FIDE top-100 list is 99 men and 1 woman). Would be interesting if it did, though.
Judit Polgár is the one I believe. Just checked by cross-referencing http://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml and http://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?list=women. Could well change in the coming decades, but competition is currently mostly separated into men's and women's divisions, like other sports (most top women compete for the Women's Chess Championship, though Polgár is a notable exception in never having entered that tournament).
edit: Was curious to look a bit more, and it seems like the reason is that there are currently very few active women in competitive chess to begin with (i.e. it's not that there are many outside the top 100 either). For example, there are 1574 Americans on the FIDE active player list, of any ranking (all the way down to rankings in the 1300s), and of those, 1491 are men and 83 are women.
yep. definitly top-down chess enthusiastics - their former president is president of the world chess association and every kid learns chess in school since his "reign".
Chess has many lessons to teach the entrepreneur, or indeed any businessperson. One is the difference between strategy (aka planning) and tactics, and the vital importance of strategy.
I've seen too many companies run entirely in reactive "what do we do next?" mode - you can't do that and win at chess or life.
Article is a bit misleading, because they mention former world champion Tigran Petrosian who passed away in 1984, and quote his son the 29-year-old grandmaster Tigran Petrosian.
Chess does not make you smarter. Chess makes you better at playing chess. Nothing more nothing less. If you want to become smarter on a specific topic then you must study that specific topic.
Well, sort of. It also primes you for an awful lot of conceptual development in the area of metacognition and computer science---understanding how to reason about a problem. While it doesn't necessarily explicitly teach the concept of problem spaces and data representation and minimaxing and heuristics, I'm confident that if I tried to explain any of that to a good chess player, they'd pick it up quickly and maybe even find it "obvious".
I think I know what you mean---but I'm not sure. If the exercise of the mind can be said to make you smarter, then surely chess is an excellent activity. Or is that not what you meant?
The only thing you exercise by playing chess is your memory of chess strategy. I'm sure there are ancillary benefits to that, but it's not really a complex intellectual activity the way it's commonly perceived.
> If you want to become smarter on a specific topic then you must study that specific topic.
This would contradict almost all current ideas on learning and education as far as I can see. Not many people think concentrating on rote learning creates a more educated society.
> Chess does not make you smarter. Chess makes you better at playing chess. Nothing more nothing less.
Chess is about problem solving and logic. I see no reason why it wouldn't help like abstract maths helps outside of the specific field of abstract maths.
>>Not many people think concentrating on rote learning creates a more educated society
Rote learning? What are you talking about? I never said you should do rote learning. If you want to become smarter in Electrical Engineering the only way to do that is to study Electrical Engineering. Unless playing chess is similar to solving or designing electrical circuits I doubt it will help you much. I hope I'm getting my point across.
But lets assume that playing chess is somehow similar to Electrical Engineering in the sense that 10% of the patterns in chess show up in Electrical Engineering. This means that 90% of the patterns you learned in chess cannot be used in Electrical Engineering. If what you want to do is learn Electrical Engineering then you've just wasted a lot of time learning 90% of chess patterns that you cannot use in EE. The time used to learn those 90% patterns could instead have been used to learn EE.
So, if all you wanted to do is learn EE then studying chess might not be a very efficient way of doing it.
I can say from my experience with engineers any that have only studied "Electrical Engineering" are in general crap or mediocre. They have very little ability to problem solve.
All the good degrees that I've seen will start engineers off studying 'engineering' including a wide variety of topics then specialise later in the degree. Yes it takes longer but it clearly pays off.
These are not engineering student that are being taught chess, these are children, at this level they are probably tossing up between arts and craft and other timing killing activities or chess.
Time in primary and high school is often wasted due to constraints.
Yes teaching them high level mathematics would be better, but where do the teachers smart enough come from? How do you teach it to classes at multiple levels.
Chess is easy to teach, students can quickly get to their own level and pair off.
I'm not saying chess is the answer even in the imperfect society we have to run schools in, but certainly teaching to the subject is absolutely not.
It seems the purpose, unless I'm missing something, is to teach children how to learn on their own. Then you can jump into EE, CS, whatever, without having to have a teacher hand hold you through the entire subject. In the Americas we seem to consider education the spoon feeding of information, and many come away without the ability to do that.
“I suspect that many children would learn arithmetic, and learn it better, if it were illegal.” — John Holt