[aaron695]

> 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.

[dsfasfasf]

>>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.

[aaron695]

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.

[randomdata]

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.