A missing piece in education

Afzal Amin | 14th February 2022 | Lobbying, Magazine

Beautiful cute genius child young girl playing chess game strategy with wooden pieces on chessboard kid concentrating planning move with king and queen

Chess can develop valuable qualities such as resilience, focus and how to recover from defeat – at low cost

Most schools have a chess club, but while some establishments take it very seriously, they are few and far between.

Chess requires two things: a will to win and concentration. Both are vital to academic study, to learning new skills and to succeeding in life. Resisting the urge to procrastinate is an inner battle that manifests in so many ways. I believe that making chess part of the mainstream may go some way toward lengthening the attention spans of young minds.

The relationship between mass adoption of chess and high performance in the workplace and in wider society can be seen in China, Hong Kong, Singapore and former Soviet republics – all of which are countries that produce some of the highest performers in maths and sciences in the world.

Teaching children to play chess systematically can and does raise the IQ, according to a 1979 study undertaken by Frank and D’Hondt, using control groups and several layers of testing on random children.

There is clearly an appetite for learning chess, and schools are very well placed to meet it. The Netflix drama series, Queen’s Gambit – in which a young female chess player takes the world by storm – was a runaway success. The New York Times reported that sales of chess sets rose by 25 per cent as a direct result in the year following its release.

While the game itself is enthralling, so too is its history. Chess is rooted in the …

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