The Societal Impact of Chess, Part 4: Looking Critically

Below is another excerpt from Chessays: Travels Through the World of Chess, Chapter 6, Far Transfer (visit our website for more details HERE)

(...)     And now, I’m convinced, we’re finally onto something. Because there are some things about chess as a modern sport that make it particularly—indeed, uniquely—valuable and important to the educational experience.  

Which brings me to Elizabeth Spiegel, the irrepressibly inspiring public school chess teacher featured in the award-winning documentary Brooklyn Castle (2012) and in Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration (2023).

Everything Elizabeth says about the intrinsic educational value of the chess experience—from developing discipline to instilling motivation to appreciating teamwork—is measured, thoughtful and inextricably tied to chess’s underlying sporting context, with many of her insights equally valid after substituting each mention of “chess” with “basketball," “tennis” or any other sport.   

Many—but not, intriguingly, all—as some have no obvious parallel with any other sport.

“One of the wonderful aspects of chess is the amount that you can study and improve on your own: you learn how to teach yourself something, and then you have checks to see if you’ve really learned it. You study an opening, you go and play blitz with it online, and then you see that you won all your games—or maybe you see that you’ve lost all your games in some variation, and you learn exactly what you need to work on.  

“So, I think the educational value of chess is not just in the analytical training, it’s also in appreciating that ultimately you’re responsible for what you learn, and you have to figure out if you’ve learned it or not in an effective way.” 

Of course, dedicated basketball and tennis players will diligently work independently on their sporting techniques too, but it seems to me that the difference between those sports and chess is a matter of kind rather than degree. There’s an element of control that the chess player has over her domain—increasingly so, in the modern age of online play and detailed analytical resources—that simply doesn’t exist in these other sports, with several very important educational implications. A soccer star may or may not be someone who can “take instruction well,” but every chess star has necessarily learned to teach herself. And that’s a big difference. 

And then there’s the equally significant, and equally unique, role that chess plays in a young person’s emotional development.  Any sports coach will tell you that what separates great players from mediocre ones isn’t so much “natural talent,” but how they learn to bounce back from the inevitable setbacks and disappointments that they will encounter in pursuit of their sporting goals. And it is this “sporting far transfer,” compelling young people to explicitly confront and eventually overcome loss and disappointment, that makes sports so pedagogically valuable. 

But what if a kid is not “sporting inclined”? How might those not naturally drawn to the school football or swim team be subjected to that formative experience of dealing with failure, forced to grapple with the pain of defeat and pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and try again?  Well, often, they won’t.  

And when the failure comes, as it surely will—whether it’s losing out in a job interview, or not getting into their first choice of college, or getting into that college and then suddenly feeling that everyone around them is much smarter than they are—they might very well not have the tools to deal with it. Indeed,  as a rule, the more outwardly “successful” the child, the less opportunity he has had to develop the requisite coping mechanisms for failure and the greater the likelihood that he will be comprehensively devastated when it is suddenly thrust upon him.

It is in this way that competitive chess comes into its own as a uniquely effective prophylactic device to prevent being overwhelmed by life’s inevitable disappointments—not only because its non-physicality renders it widely available to the largest possible cross-section of students, but because the sting of failure in chess is particularly bitter.

When you lose in a team sport, you have your teammates to console yourself with (or to blame), and even when you lose in an individual sport there is always the wind, or a bad bounce, or a sore wrist or something that can vaguely be held accountable, at least to some extent.  

But when you lose a chess game, there is nothing other than the cold, harsh reality of incontrovertible intellectual defeat to forcibly contend with.  If you can handle chess failure, you can handle any failure.  

And so it turns out that chess does have its own singularly impressive far transfer aspects to it after all, but its rag-tag group of unreflective chess-in-schools advocates, mired in their Armenia-boosting, mathematics-spouting, reality-denying preoccupations, have conspicuously failed to learn what they actually are.  

Isn’t that ironic? (This is the end of the excerpt from Chessays: Travels Through the World of Chess)

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As I will discuss in the next post, it also turns out that chess’ unique societal benefits are hardly limited to the domain of education, but before we leave  the educational realm, I’d like to return to the issue of “chess and critical thinking,” because I think it merits a more intense treatment than the occasional sarcastic aside I’ve been giving it throughout these pieces.  

The reason I am particularly sensitive to the repeated abuses of the notion of “critical thinking” by chess advocates is not simply that it piques my sense of irony (i.e. using “critical thinking” in a blatantly uncritical way), but because I’m firmly convinced that by far the most important aspect of the contemporary educational experience should be the instillation of genuine critical thinking skills, but it is woefully apparent to me that that this is most definitely not the case.    

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not one of those people who believe that education shouldn’t consist of people learning specific things—when the Renaissance happened, how to take derivatives of functions and so forth. It most definitely should. But however significant all that is, it’s painfully obvious to me that by far our most pressing need these days is to ensure that the next generation (well, any generation for that matter) is equipped with the necessary skills to independently examine the ever-strident claims coming at us from all sides in order to effectively distinguish between the blatantly self-serving and deliberately manipulative from the objectively reasonable.   

And chess, for all of its merits, clearly doesn’t help with any of that. At all. That is, of course, hardly chess’ fault.  It is a game (or sport—the difference is immaterial here) with its own set of rules and procedures within a highly specified domain. It has nothing to do with encouraging people to logically analyze the merits and contexts of statements to evaluate their validity. Maintaining that mastering chess will help us think more critically is like pretending that learning to play backgammon will make us better cooks.  

Worse still (which is why I’ve explicitly highlighted it in the past), my recent intense experiences have convinced me that the chess world is, on the whole, particularly prone to uncritical reflexes, from automatically assuming that Garry Kasparov should be listened to whenever he veers away from the subject of chess (which is, sadly, all too often) to blithely swallowing whatever some self-proclaimed “chess historian” declares if it makes you feel good enough, to much more besides.  

 So when—to return to a point from a previous post—Sergey Karjakin, one of the world’s best chess players, proudly declared, “No matter what happens, I will support my country in any situation without thinking for a second!” my first reaction was not, How atypical for chess players to utter such an emphatically uncritical sentiment!, but rather, Here we go again… (particularly when, as also mentioned in an earlier post, he is then “officially sanctioned” for his comments by the current president of FIDE who has devoted his entire political career to encouraging precisely such a dangerously uncritical response from the citizenry he supposedly represented and nobody seems to notice any problem).   

So please: stop saying that chess promotes critical thinking. It doesn’t. And by pretending that it does, particularly at times like these when genuine critical thinking is in such dangerously short supply and the global chess community is so obviously bereft of it, you risk becoming a laughing stock.  

Chess doesn’t need to represent critical thinking skills any more than it needs to represent a cure for cancer. It is a beautiful and wonderfully stimulating activity. And as if that weren’t enough in itself, it turns out that, if you look carefully, it can also be used in a number of important and inspirational ways to concretely improve our world, as we shall see shortly. That should be enough, no?

A BIT OF BACKGROUND:  

My name is Howard Burton and I am a documentary filmmaker and author. I produced a recently released 4-part documentary, THROUGH THE MIRROR OF CHESS: A CULTURAL EXPLORATION, about the remarkable impact of chess on culture, art, science and sport. I also wrote a book, CHESSAYS: TRAVELS THROUGH THE WORLD OF CHESS, about all sorts of chess-related issues that I encountered during my time spent as a tourist in the chess world. Visit our website for more details HERE.