Chess in the educational environment:

keynote address by Dr Brian Boyd (University of Strathclyde)

On April 30 2003, midway through the innovative Teaching the Teachers Chess Programme, jointly run by North Ayrshire Council and Chess Scotland, University of Strathclyde educationalist and former headmaster, Dr Brian Boyd, gave a fascinating talk on chess in the educational environment. I was pleased to be asked by Chess Scotland to attend Dr Boyd's talk in the Greenwood Teachers' Centre in Irvine, where the ten-week course takes place.

Dr Boyd's academic and practitioner's credentials are formidable and he is also an excellent public speaker. When his opening slide posed the question whether the exam system was the enemy of creativity, the audience and I knew we were about to be vastly entertained as well as informed. When he then went on to bill his talk as potentially subversive, we were certain.

Dr Boyd introduced us to UNESCO's four aims of education. These are learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together and learning to be. The developed world accentuates the "knowing" aim, measurable by exam systems, which have their critics. There is a genuine question whether exams test true knowledge and learning or cramming and exam skills.

There is undoubtedly a place for exams in education. But Dr Boyd argued that improved balance, and delivery against the other three aims of UNESCO, might be achievable by promoting more currently non-core and even extra-curricular school activities, such as music, arts, sport and technology, at greater arm's length from the exam room.

Dr Boyd noted that the Scottish Education Department is currently pressing schools to promote creativity, innovation and flexibility in managing the school curriculum. Taught well, chess, like music, the arts and other sports, develops intelligence, knowledge and a wide range of desirable social and learning skills. Dr Boyd would like to see more such activities taught in schools, but considers that they should not be primarily exam-driven.

Acknowledging a debt to Scottish chess grandmaster, Jonathan Rowson, Dr Boyd considered in more detail what contribution chess might make to learning. His discussion was very much couched in the language of lifelong learning and life skills. The notion that we must all be increasingly adaptable and able to continue to develop and learn new skills throughout our entire lives in the 21st century is now centre stage in educational thinking.

In this regard, Dr Boyd considered that playing chess is likely to promote spatial and analytical intelligence, effective learning and inter-personal skills, problem solving and decision-making, self-esteem and self-confidence. This is not an exhaustive list. For example, at the chessboard, pupils can often appear to be absorbed in what psychologists are now calling "flow", that is a heightened and beneficial sense of concentration, application and enjoyment that truly engages.

To those familiar with what little research evidence there is in this area and aware of outcomes of recent chess in school and community programmes in such diverse locations as the USA, England and, closer to home, in the ongoing Aberdeen Primary Schools Chess Project, much lauded in a recent report by HM Inspectorate of Education, into Standards and Quality in Community Learning and Development in the Northfield, Mastrick and Summerhill areas of Aberdeen (ISBN 0705350495), none of this comes as a surprise.

Introduced creatively and flexibly into schools, chess provides considerable potential to benefit the individual, the group and communities. This includes potential to bridge the home/school gap, which is a particular aim in Aberdeen and one which the course organisers hope to include in a research project, and to challenge age/stage barriers, by mixing instruction and play across age and classroom divisions.

Dr Boyd ended with a plea to chess teachers to challenge a range of invalid assumptions. As all chess players know, chess is not just for "brain-boxes" (would that we all were!). As world top ten player, Judit Polgar and current joint-Scottish champion, Kete Arakhamia-Grant, demonstrate, neither is chess just for boys. And the game is not just about winning and losing. Much chess is played in the context of teams.

Noting that the Glasgow Rangers football manager had recently been questioned on TV about a prominent chess set in his office, Dr Boyd asked teachers to make the wider connections between chess and the community explicit. Chess is good fun, has a rich tradition, influences people and is a first-class mind-sport with transferable skills.

To those who recall that famous Steve McQueen chessboard love scene in the original Thomas Crown Affair, or the dramatic opening shots of grandmaster Kronsteen executing a famous mate from one of the real-life David Bronstein's games against Boris Spassky in the James Bond film From Russia with Love, chess can also be incredibly cool.

Craig Pritchett
3 May 2003

Click on the following links for more information about the North Ayrshire Teaching the Teachers Chess Programme, the Aberdeen Primary Schools Chess Project and Herald feature on the Aberdeen Project.