Chess in Education

The article shows proof that chess classes improved kids behaviour and grades.

But it doesn't take into account the time spent in those classes.

I mean, is it worth it?

There was nothing in that article to demonstrate that chess improved these kid's grades at all.  It wasn't even anecdotal, because they didn't give any before and after results.  (And why lingerie ads in a middle school newspaper - weird.)

But even if it had improved some of their grades, there is a phenomenon where any sort of change or attention results in positive benefits, e.g. a well known workplace study from the 1930's where any sort of change whatsoever to the worker's environment produced favorable results in productivity in the short run.

It doesn't surprise me that chess people thinks it indicates something though

I think that is the difference between the article being a report on the mechanics and technical aspects of the programs and being a press article telling people that it is happening (once the evidence has already been seen).

We would have loved the paper to produce our outcome statistics for each student but I don't think that that makes a good read for their readers lol.

BMTC-UK are not necessarily chess people but behavioural analysts, therapists, coaches and business trainers - we simply use chess in this program as a place for our clients/students to put into practice the real world strategies that we are teaching them given their personal or organisational area of need or wanted outcome.

In short I totally agree, chess, on its own, in our opinion is not enough therefore our claims and evidence of outcomes is sligtly different to how the press likes display.

Your comments are great - thank you

That is such an important question and point in general.

Thanks for your commentI

n terms of time per week or per day - what do you think would be worth it or appropriate to? 

Well, to answer this question we must take into account all the other activities kids could be doing other than chess and there are quite a lot of them.

We should also decide what the kids should pursue, what qualities and abilities are to be attained. There are many of them too. 

No one can ever hope to fully and correctly answer such a question, because of its complexity and its subjectiveness.

May I, however, humbly point out that all Western development and so-called-evolution of the last two thousand years has only led to increasing amount of unhappiness and that chess looks like the perfect mean to further advance in this direction.

That is to say, when a ten-year-old speaks like a middle-aged man ("before this i wasn't really thinking about my decisions and what i was doing with my life, now I take time before I make a decision and I think about how I can reach my goals") something is wrong.

I say, no more chess for 10-year-olds.