The KingmakerHow Bobby Fischer brought chess to America.
Posted Friday, Jan. 18, 2008, at 6:51 PM ET
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StumbleUponAmerica's dedicated boosters of youth chess don't put it quite that way, of course—certainly not to financial backers, school administrators, teachers, or parents. They're busy touting the educational benefits of the game largely in terms of classroom success. They invoke an array of studies that correlate chess with improving children's reading scores, enhancing problem-solving skills, developing critical and creative thinking (as just about any special program that gives kids extra attention has a good chance of doing). But as Weinreb's on-the-ground reporting reveals, the pitch to the kids themselves isn't so pedagogically correct: Chess is not a high-GPA goody-goody's pursuit by any means, nor is it special-ed in disguise, certainly not at progressive Murrow. Like any serious coach, Eliot Weiss isn't about to pretend that winning is unimportant, and he's busy wooing good players (whatever their academic records) to his team; many come from a middle school with an especially good chess program, I.S. 318, or from Russian and Eastern European families in which the game got introduced early. But Weiss—eager to exploit the egalitarianism of a game based on accessible rules that presume no prior knowledge—also opens the chess club door wide to beginners; who is going to practice, practice, practice is hard to predict. And he is also humble about predicting how, exactly, the struggles and victories at the board are otherwise likely to help—or hinder—the motley Murrow bunch.
As it happens, this kind of no-nonsense approach to chess, an endeavor usually steeped in the mystique of genius, seems to be scientifically correct. Chess has been called the "Drosophila of cognitive science": Thanks not least to its precise rating system for levels of expertise, it lends itself to testing theories of thinking and memory (much as the fruit fly's gestational speed makes it ideal for genetics experiments). The latest research findings argue against elevating aptitude over effort, or expecting a fierce focus on the game to translate readily into mastery or a sense of purpose beyond the board. Chess expertise, recent studies suggest, is based on laboriously amassing a bigger "store of structured knowledge," rather than on intrinsically powerful analytic capacities. The more patterns a player internalizes, the more intricate a system of combinations that player can access. At lower levels, that allows a stronger player to run through more possibilities than a weaker one would; at the top, there's a quantitative to qualitative shift, with grandmasters zeroing in on the best possibilities, rather than reviewing more possibilities faster than an expert would. But if you ask a top player to remember random positions of pieces on a chessboard, rather than situations that might actually arise in master-level play, his powers of recall don't correlate nearly as well with his skill. In other words, a studiously honed memory for chess combinations doesn't necessarily transfer to better retention of other material.
The fact that the stars of the Murrow team and the I.S. 318 program aren't standout students doesn't keep some coaches from hailing their brilliance at the board—or from prodding them to be more conscientious about their schoolwork, or about visiting the college counselor. But the main goal is to let the game—with its blend of rigid rules and absolutist rankings on the one hand, and its infinite possibilities and competitive allure on the other—do what it is ideally designed to do. It has an allure that motivates kids to do the hard work of honing basic skills and then discovering their own styles, goaded ever onward by a rating system that can show them every increment of improvement. Ruthless standards and dizzying freedom, all in one package: That is a rarity. And it is a recipe for what experts call "effortful study," or the process of indefatigably tackling ever harder challenges, which many believe is the secret to successfully pursuing excellence in anything. Except, that is, when the fervent focus itself becomes too all-consuming a distraction.
Here chess holds a lesson that can get overlooked in educational rhetoric and on the corporate lecture circuit: The passion that spurs the endless practice required for outstanding performance (Bobby the "natural" in fact pored over books) is not always so different from the snares of obsession. The ordeal of chess mastery can indeed propel a youthful player onward to tireless commitment to honing talent elsewhere in life: Dip into The Art of Learning, a memoir-cum-how-to book by the now 30-year-old Josh Waitzkin, whose arduous journey from chess prodigy to the pursuit of champion-level tai chi prowess sounds at once miraculous and bordering on masochistic. But chess, precisely because the abstract challenges on the board can be so absorbing, can also derail a kid. Listen to Shawn, who's ranked third on the Murrow team and constantly skips school to play blitz games in the park. In an interview with the New York Times before the high-school championships, the foundering student lashed out at his mentors. "I became addicted to chess. They think they did something for me, but they didn't. Chess didn't save my life. They want to make it like I'm a kid from the ghetto and I can play chess and that's special. Why does it have to be like that? It's embarrassing." Though Shawn would doubtless bridle at the suggestion, just such caustic clear-headedness about the limits of his beloved chess may be the best proof of how much he has learned.
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Remarks from the Fray:
Ann Hulbert wrote an amazingly insightful article on the relationship between chess mastery and its effects on those struggling with their personal chess improvement. Her observations and anecdotal tales shed light on the tip of the educational iceberg; the development of a chess player is simply a mirror of the new American society.
Chess, in a nutshell, is not the savior of American education. It isn't going to make a kid a better student, a better person, a productive member of society. Like anything else that kids become obsessed with, it has inherent seeds of destruction in it, much like video games, cable TV, the internet, art, etc. The point is, we allow kids to become obsessed with actions because we don't know what else to do for them.
Fischer became a James Dean anti-hero with a chessboard and a head full of talent and knowledge - in chess. He was pretty much a misanthropic kid who became even more insufferable because he confused chess ability with intelligence and importance. He was, and is, a microcosm of what we do to our kids in America on a daily basis. We don't really care about excellence in too many things, but, dammit, we want to look good while fooling ourselves and others. Fischer was an authentic chess prodigy, but it stopped there. To say that he was an asset to society would be akin to saying tooth decay is valuable to us because it keeps dentists in business. As much as I admired his chess ability, I was disappointed by his lack of awareness of the world around him.
Chess is a beautiful game, and I love playing it, but I will never be considered anything more than a wood pusher. Still, when I can execute a fork or skewer, or I can see a multiple-move combination that garners me material, space, or position, I am at the pinnacle of what I think chess should be. I refuse to become obsessed with it, so it remains beautiful.
We do not teach our future generations to search for beauty. We teach them the quadratic formula and the need to earn lots of money. We have become obsessed capitalists, finding virtue only in profit. To say that we have lost our way, as individuals and as a country, is ugly but truthful. We really have forgotten what made us great; we forgot to let Bobby Fischer be a person.
Who is worse, the dictator, or the populace that allowed this to transpire? Perhaps we need to take a long, hard look at what we are doing to our talented kids before we make them into something we eventually despise. Maybe we should look at what we are doing to ourselves...
--Dentedsykee
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