Below I am reproducing an article by a British journalist...
I think Canada and U.S. should follow the British advice and Armenia's lead...Check has to be a compulsory course in Grade 9, 10, 11 and 12...
It may be tagged to the Math curriculum or initiated independently...
The ministry of Education may consult with the Armenia's ambassador in Ottawa and Washington...They may invite experts for developing the chess curriculum...
It is doable and it is fun...May be we can establish the fact that thinking and developing strategies CAN BE FUN too...
Math may be an abstract topic or to tedious with skills and facts...Chess may develop thinking strategies and connect the logical steps in a FUN way...
H.K.
A
checkered history: why Armenia dominates the chess world
Amid
calls for the UK to embrace chess as an academic subject, chess enthusiasts
look to Armenia, the Caucasian state that improbably dominates the chess world.
Enjoying chess in Armenia
Last month, the former president of
education union the Association of Teachers and Lecturers Hank Roberts said Britain
should make chess compulsory in all state primary schools. He wants children to
learn a game that is so much more than “kings, queens, rooks etc”.
He
complained that the UK was behind many other European countries in failing to
recognise the game as a sport. But the only country in the world to have compulsory
chess lessons is Armenia: a small, post-Soviet state landlocked in the
Caucasus.
Armenia is not a natural leader on the
global stage. Its tensions with neighbouring Turkey are ever-present from the
memory of its past turmoil with the
Ottomans during the First World War, and on the other side, it
remains at war with Azerbaijan.
Aside from its modern-day mouthpiece, the Kardashians – a somewhat double-edged
nail-file – it has a tough time having its voice heard in the Caucasus, let
alone the world.
Armenia is ranked as a lower middle income country
by the World Bank. It has an average life expectancy of 74 and its poverty rate
as a percentage of the population is 32.4 per cent. Its literacy rate is at 99.6 per cent and
in 2011, it brought in compulsory chess lessons at primary school age. It is
the only country to have done so.
For a
country so hopelessly unable to master the world’s geo-political realities, it
is a cradle of strategy, precision and expert outmanoeuvring. It soars ahead in
its aptitude at chess.
“Of the bits I’ve seen of the Armenian
model, I was impressed with how incredibly good their children were at
visualising things,” remarks theTelegraph’s chess
columnist and head of charity Chess in Schools and Communities Malcolm Pein. “I
saw, I think it was a class of what we call here Year Fours, who could
literally move pieces around in their head along a chessboard. A lot of
children can do that, but they were incredibly good at it.”
Through
his campaigning for chess in schools, Pein is aiming for every child in the UK
to have 30 hours of chess lessons in their six years of primary school. He’s
not working towards a compulsory programme, which is somewhat easier to
organise in a state with a population of three million than in the UK, but
praises Armenia’s scheme:
“What
the Armenians have done is demonstrate organisationally how it's possible to
teach chess to an entire country,” he says. “Admittedly it's a small country,
but they did it in a very, very systematic way. They got together I think about
300 people and taught them how to teach chess... that's the main constraint to
getting it out there, that not that many people know how to teach it.”
Armenia triumphed in the most recent
Chess Olympiad – a particularly joyous checkmate for the country, as the
contest was held in Istanbul. It often beats the globally mightier chess
superpowers like Russia, China, the US and Ukraine. It also claimed the crown
(or, indeed, the king) in 2006 and 2008 – which is two in a row; the Chess
Olympiad is bi-annual. It has one of the highest numbers of
grandmasters per capita in the world.
The country’s obsession with chess
transcends all age groups. You can see this in a 2009 BBC World Service report
titled ‘Armenia: the cleverest
nation on earth’, which notes “four generations” turning out to
watch its champion Levon Aronian play a match in the Armenian mountains. It
describes “young kids aged five, six, seven years old and grizzled old men in
sunglasses.”
Dr
Armen Sarkissian, the Armenian ambassador to the UK and briefly Armenian prime
minister in the Nineties, gives his experience of the game’s universal appeal
there:
“I
have a granddaughter who is two, and one of the toys she has is a chessboard.
It helps so much with concentration, discipline, ability of tactics and
strategy. It’s very important.
“I
was a child when my father taught me – I was very good at chess. I used to beat
very old people, who’d get annoyed that a child was beating them... When I was
really young, I remember we had a neighbour, a retired gentleman, who I played
chess with, and running between being fed and making my next move.”
As a result of the game’s popularity,
their chess players are revered as celebrities. Their current top player, the
tousled and be-stubbled Aronian, is also a bit of a heartthrob. Teenagers want
to have photos taken with him, and he’s been likened to Armenia’s David Beckham.
When
grandmaster Tigran Petrosian, World Chess Champion from 1963-69, took the title
for the first time, there were spontaneous celebrations throughout Armenia and
he became a national hero.
“The
whole nation was behind it,” recalls Sarkissian. “There was a huge chessboard
showing the game in Opera Square in Yerevan [the capital], and tens of
thousands of people were watching it. Everyone watched it. It was a national victory.
“There
were not many ways of displaying your national pride in the Soviet Union, but
for an Armenian guy to win, there was huge pride for the whole nation. People
on the streets were singing, dancing. It was natural, not organised by the
state.”
Although
Armenia became a hothouse for producing chess champions under the Soviet Union
– eager to have its talented comrades triumph over the West in all endeavours –
it has a historical love of chess that goes way back to the Middle Ages.
“It’s
an old game that was popular in Armenia for centuries,” notes Sarkissian, “then
it became very, very popular during the Soviet era – sixties, seventies,
eighties and further.”
Indeed,
Garry Kasparov, formerly a Soviet grandmaster, and considered by many as the
world’s best ever chess player, is of Armenian heritage. His surname was
originally Gasparyan – which has the classic common ending of an Armenian
name, which usually end in "ian" or "yan".
“I’m
proud of Armenia,” concludes Sarkissian. “I hope that one day I’ll be proud of
Armenia on other sectors as well! I want Armenia to be as prominent in economy,
industrial growth, culture and others as it is in chess. It needs a lot of hard
work, devotion and love.”
It
is oddly pleasing that a nation so unfortunately located on the Caucasian
chessboard of socio-religious turmoil excels at a game reliant on superior
positioning.
But perhaps this is why it is a pastime so relished
by the country’s population. Having been relegated for so long to being a pawn
in the game of empires from the Ottomans to the Soviets, there must be some
satisfaction in finally capturing the king.
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