The goal: A nation of chess players - and thinkers

The Republic of Armenia may not be a superpower, but it has much to teach America when it comes to education.

The former Soviet republic last month made chess a mandatory school subject for children over 6, citing the benefits of chess in fostering strategic thinking.

It's a great gambit by a nation angling to become a superpower in the chess world.

But it's so much more than that, says chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, who lobbied for Armenia's new law as part of a years-long campaign to have governments and school officials around the world adopt chess as part of the primary-school curriculum.

Kasparov says he's working on a similar initiative in the Republic of Georgia. And he continues to lobby American lawmakers and local school boards through the Kasparov Chess Foundation, which he established in 2002. The foundation, based in Montville, N.J., has developed a chess study guide, which more than 3,000 schools across the country have adopted.

Kasparov, 48, believes chess can fundamentally alter and improve student performance in every area, including reading and writing, math, even art.

"Chess is simple enough to learn quickly, complex enough to reward concentration, and uses a very broad skill set - creativity, calculation, visualization, research," Kasparov says by e-mail from his home in Moscow. "There are now ample studies showing across the board improvement in classrooms where chess is taught."

Kasparov says educators have become so obsessed with assessing student performance in specific subjects, they don't often appreciate the importance of preparing children to learn.

Chess, he says, is the ultimate way to lay the groundwork. "Again, this is because more than preparing for any specific subject, chess encourages focus and determination, qualities that reward the budding artist as much as the future scientist," he explains.

University of Pennsylvania educator Frances O'Connell Rust concurs. Rust, director of the teacher education program at the Graduate School of Education, spent several years supervising student teachers in the New York City public school system.

She says she was astonished at how the game helped improve cognitive capacities, even in kindergarten and first grade. "Children that young would begin with just a few pieces on the board," she says, "but they began learning how to anticipate moves and to think ahead."

Rust says chess allows students to experience thinking itself, "something no other subject in the curriculum can do. . . . Children learn how to pull back and be alone with their thinking." That kind of reflective activity is invaluable for children, Rust concludes.

Salome Thomas-EL has added chess as an elective course for third graders at Thomas A. Edison Charter School in Wilmington, where he is principal.

"Chess isn't necessarily the primary purpose of the class," says Thomas-EL, who developed an acclaimed chess club in the 1990s when he was principal of Vaux High School in North Philadelphia.

Thomas-EL writes about the importance of chess in his own life in his memoir, I Choose to Stay: A Black Teacher Refuses to Desert the Inner City. He says students exposed to chess learn to be less fatalistic. "So many young people are raised to believe that you are either born smart or born dumb," he says. "Chess shatters that fallacy. It's the great equalizer. It teaches you that you are not born smart, but you become smart."

The salutary effects of chess aren't limited to the intellect. The game inspires positive behavioral changes, says Temple University's director of community relations, L. Harrison Jay, who leads a chess club for students at Meade Elementary School in North Philadelphia.

"Chess makes you pay attention to the consequences of your actions and the value of the different decisions you make," he says. "Life is like a chess game. That is what we are teaching the kids. . . . Not that they must win, but that they are accountable for all their moves."

Chess master and Temple University physics professor Leroy Dubeck, president of the United States Chess Federation from 1969 to 1972, says he spent decades advocating chess in American schools - to no avail.

He predicts Kasparov's dream will flounder on the harsh economic realities facing American schools. "School district after school district is laying off teachers, getting rid of sports and arts programs," Dubeck says. "It's just not possible economically. . . . I speak from bitter experience."