Paul Tough’s bestseller How Children Succeed: Grit Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character includes a chapter entitled: How to Think.
The award-winning documentary Brooklyn Castle showcased the children at IS318, a New York middle school, where “the cool kids are the chess team”. The game is a tool for social mobility and can be transformational for some. The game can assist social mobility, with many of the children using their prowess at chess not only as a confidence booster, but also as an enhancement to the CV that can get them to a higher achieving secondary school. Perhaps more than anything, chess helps to instil the attributes psychologist Angela Duckworth describes in her book: Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Knowing they can play a game their parents do not, and which is a mystery to many of their peers, boosts children’s self-esteem. It can boost non-cognitive, or softer skills, such as the ability to delay gratification and to follow through on a plan. The game teaches essential skills such as problem solving, logical thinking and concentration. The benefits to children of playing chess have been well documented in academic research and in an abundance of anecdotes from teachers and parents that we at CSC call ‘chesstimonials’. Chess boosts kids’ cognitive skills and self-esteem It starts with the humble pawn and ends in the summer term with checkmate and that anomalous rule that’s started a million fights in the pub: en passant. Before lockdown we were conducting more than 800 chess lessons a week in class time, teaching primary school children the game from a specially devised 30-week curriculum. Over the past decade, the charity has supported more than 1,000 state schools in developing a chess club.