Each 20 July is commemorated as United Nations World Chess Day.

The Thammasat University Library owns several books about the history and playing strategies of chess.

World Chess Day is the same day that the International Chess Federation was established in Paris in 1924.

According to some studies, up to 70% of adults in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, and India have played chess at least once.

While it is an aggressively competitive game, chess is seen as transcending national boundaries and breaking down racial, political and social barriers.

Chess also plays an educational role in many nations, including Thailand. In this way, the game fits into the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including in strengthening education and health, promoting empowerment of women and girls, fostering solidarity, cooperation and peace.

Thailand and Chess

Many TU students will be familiar with the Chess in Schools (CIS) program, which has made an impact in the Kingdom.

In March 2013, CIS commission Chairman Ali Nihat Yazici made an official visit to Bangkok where he met with board members of the Thailand Chess Association.

Two years earlier, the International Chess Federation had launched the CIS project in Thailand.

Why Chess in Schools?

The CIS program

aims to use chess within the educational framework to improve educational outcomes rather than using the educational environment to produce chess players (although that is an inevitable and very welcome by-product).

There is a focus on students aged from 7 to 11, but there are also social educational programs in early years skills for pre-schoolers at home or in kindergarten.

When children this young enjoy playing chess, the activity develops their psychomotor skills. The term psychomotor derives from two Greek words meaning mind and motion.

As TU Faculty of Education students know, psychomotricity is a way of educational or therapeutic intervention aimed at the development of motor, expressive, and creative possibilities through the body… Psychomotor education is a pedagogic and therapeutic approach, the aim of which is to support and aid an individual’s personal development. It is based on a holistic view of human beings that considers each individual as a unity of physical, emotional and cognitive actualities, which interact with each other and the surrounding social environment.

The TU Library collection includes a number of books about developing psychomotor skills.

The CIS program also boosts the professional level of chess teachers in the Kingdom. As a CIS publication notes,

The value of chess as a tool for education & social benefits was first recognized by Benjamin Franklin in 1786. In his article, The Morals of Chess, he wrote “life is a kind of chess” and that by playing chess, we may learn foresight, circumspection and caution and also “the habit of not being discouraged by present bad appearances in the state of our affairs … persevering in the search of resources.” The educational benefits of chess came to be widely recognized during the 20th century. It is only really in this 21st century that the social and health benefits of chess have begun to be appreciated…An issue for students from poverty is the underdevelopment of thinking skills due to an environment that lacks enrichment. The gap in development is a result of the impoverished social context. Chess as a way of “learning through play” provides the social context in which to develop or remediate thinking skills.  Those three skills – analysis, evaluation and creation – are all involved at every step of a chess game…

Chess provides the perfect educational cutlery for teaching those higher order thinking skills, using a combination of both critical thinking and creative thinking. The main challenge for children should be to explore and develop the way that we think. If it could be fun as well, that would be ideal.

Chess helps promote intellectual growth and has been shown to improve academic performance. Chess is a powerful tool for developing thinking and memory in children. It also helps them build up their decision-making skills. It educates them to be responsible for their decisions and the consequences of those decisions.

The CIS publication adds:

Chess is noted as beneficial for cognitive skills:

• Focusing Attention – Children soon learn that if they don’t watch what is happening on the chessboard, they can’t respond to it, no matter how clever they are.
• Visualization – Imagining a sequence of actions before it happens. This ability is strengthened by moving the pieces in the mind before doing so on the board.
• Abstract Reasoning – The ability to analyse information, detect patterns and relationships, and solve problems is developed. One learns to take patterns used in one context and apply them to different, but related situations.
• Planning – Developing longer range goals and taking steps to bring them about. The need to re-evaluate plans as developments change the situation.
• Weighing Options – Learning that you don’t have to do the first thing that pops into the mind.
• Analysing Concretely – Does this sequence help me or hurt me?
• Thinking Ahead – Learning to think first, then act.

Chess helps build individual friendships and also school spirit when children compete together as teams against other schools. Chess also teaches children about sportsmanship – how to win graciously and not give up when encountering defeat. For children with adjustment issues, there are many examples where chess has led to increased motivation, improved behaviour, better self-image, and even improved attendance. Chess provides a positive social outlet, a wholesome recreational activity that can be easily learned and enjoyed at any age.

An estimated 30 million or more children participate in chess in school programs around the world on a weekly basis. Of these, about 20 million are in Asia, with six or seven million in Europe, two to three million in the Americas and one million in Africa. Over 138 countries around the world have CIS programs. These include Thailand, and elsewhere in Asia, India has about 17 million children involved nationwide, especially in the states of Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, where chess is part of the curriculum.

In 2011, Armenia became the first nation to introduce chess as a compulsory part of the school curriculum. Armenian schools teach chess as an academic subject, so the focus is on educational, rather than competitive, chess.

Sweden has a particularly outstanding CIS project that tries to maximize social inclusivity.

In an August 2011 article posted online, the Bangkok Chess Club was profiled:

When the Thais hear the word chess, the electrical signals sent by their neurons make the connection to makruk, the word for Thai chess, a game highly popular with the population of Thailand (and Cambodia). You can see motorbike taxi drivers playing this game of Indian origins at many corners in Bangkok, patiently waiting for their next passenger (or the next traffic jam to whistle through). According to B.D. Prichard’s book Popular Chess Variants, as of year 2000, two million Thais actively play makruk and 5000 of them also play chess.

Although over 600 million people play chess around the world (thus making it the most popular Olympic sport), it is not wise to undermine makruk. On the contrary, Vladimir Kramnik, another Russian former world chess champion, admitted that Thai chess is more strategic than international chess.  Also, in his 1913 History of Chess, H.J.R. Murray identified makruk as the ancestor of all chess variants played today…

Bangkok Chess Club is recognized worldwide as being the organizer of some of the best open championships… If you are interested in playing chess with a large variety of nationalities, then you should be pleased to know that Bangkok Chess Club meets twice a week…There are over 200 active members in the club, so you will most likely find someone your own standard to play with, no matter if you’re a beginner or a master.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)