As you can see it’s hard to quantify the benefits of playing chess. It is clearly a complex matter but I wish to give my humble opinion. Learning Chess is probably one of the most important pedagogical tools, whoever can take advantage of it, go ahead!
The problem is when chess is forced upon kids and these kids don’t want to learn and they end up hating it. Chess is divided into different stages, an initial stage where you learn to move the pieces, watch out for basic threats, the next stage involves basic tactics, and so on.
Getting from one stage to the next is hard, it might take two weeks or maybe a few months based on how fast your brain and your play can adapt to the change. Some teachers says that the learning habits of a chess player is ascending spiral, you improve until you reach your point and then you lose interest because you don’t see any improvement but when you come back you are stronger.
The real problem with teaching chess to small children is that chess maturity comes at around 12, during this time they start taking the game more seriously. For these reasons I think chess should be taught at chess academies , especially at a young age.
Whether I’m right or wrong on the subject has yet to be seen. However now that Armenia has made chess a compulsory subject in schools we will just have to wait to see the effect of this law on this small country. Who knows, maybe their test scores will shoot up in 2-3 years proving that the benefits of chess, are in fact, quite real.
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