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Thursday, July 3, 2025

DOU­BLE ROOKS

MOU signed for chess in schools

by

20121011

Trinidad and To­ba­go is the first coun­try in the west­ern hemi­sphere and the third in the world to ben­e­fit from as­sis­tance from FIDE, the world chess body, for set­ting up a chess-in-schools pro­gramme.

A mem­o­ran­dum of un­der­stand­ing set­ting out the ba­sic in­gre­di­ents for such a pro­gramme was signed on Mon­day at the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion.

En­dors­ing the agree­ment were Nigel Free­man, Ex­ec­u­tive Di­rec­tor of FIDE; Kath­leen Thomas, Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary in the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry and Rus­sell Smith, pres­i­dent of the T&T Chess As­so­ci­a­tion. Free­man, who had ac­com­pa­nied FIDE Pres­i­dent Kir­san Ilyumzhi­nov to Suri­name for the Uma­da Cup In­ter­na­tion­al, flew in­to Trinidad in­stead of Ilyumzhi­nov who was called back to Rus­sia by re­cent­ly re-elect­ed Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin.

As Free­man ex­plained it to DR, the MOU pro­vides for the teach­ing of chess to school teach­ers who, in turn, will teach the game to their stu­dents as non-aca­d­e­m­ic sub­jects.

Ini­tial­ly, he said, FIDE will pro­vide two train­ers to car­ry out this en­abling func­tion. But ex­act­ly who these train­ers would be he could not say at they were still work­ing out the op­er­a­tional specifics of the pro­gramme.

It is en­vi­sioned that the pre­lim­i­nary stage would ex­tend over the next four years be­fore the ac­tu­al teach­ing of chess in schools be­gins.

Fol­low­ing the sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny in Port-of-Spain, the FIDE Ex­ec­u­tive Di­rec­tor ad­dressed a grather­ing of stu­dent teach­ers at the UTT Col­lege in Val­sayn, ap­peal­ing to them to take up the of­fer and adopt the sport of chess as one of their teach­ing dis­ci­plines.

Free­man spoke about the mind-im­prov­ing ben­e­fits of chess and pro­voked a peal of laugh­ter from his large­ly fe­male au­di­ence when he ex­pressed the hope that their in­volve­ment in the pro­gramme could re­sult in turn­ing around the tra­di­tion­al gen­der im­bal­ance ex­ist­ing in the sport. "Boys are bet­ter at chess, and we don't know why," he said. "Maybe Trinidad and To­ba­go will be able to change this pat­tern and show that girls are bet­ter."

Dur­ing his brief stay in Trinidad, the FIDE Ex­ec­u­tive Di­rec­tor was ac­com­pa­nied by Al­lan Her­bert, chair­man of the FIDE De­vel­op­ment Com­mit­tee, and a group of T&T Chess As­so­ci­a­tion of­fi­cials in­clud­ing pres­i­dent Smith, first vice pres­i­dent Rod­er­ick Noel and sec­ond vice pres­i­dent Hay­den Lee.

Al­so ad­dress­ing the UTT stu­dent teach­ers, Her­bert gave a brief his­to­ry of the "an­cient and fas­ci­nat­ing" game which he said dat­ed back to the sev­enth cen­tu­ry in Asia.

He re­called that chess was played on an or­gan­ised ba­sis in the West In­dies for more than a cen­tu­ry as the first in­ter-colo­nial cham­pi­onship in­volv­ing T&T, Bar­ba­dos and Guyana was held in 1898. He not­ed that T&T had tak­en the lead as the first coun­try in the west­ern hemi­sphere to for­mal­ly sign an agree­ment with FIDE to push this ini­tia­tive in schools.

He told the stu­dent teach­ers they would have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to play a key part in spear­head­ing the pro­gramme de­signed to em­ploy chess as an ed­u­ca­tion­al tool.

It seems im­por­tant for this pro­gramme to suc­ceed as its suc­cess would pro­vide FIDE with the added in­cen­tive to ex­pand its pro­gramme to oth­er coun­tries, es­pe­cial­ly small de­vel­op­ing states such as ours. Free­man told DR, in fact, that so far FIDE had ini­ti­at­ed the plan in just two oth­er coun­tries, Slove­nia and Slo­va­kia.

Just how many stu­dent teach­ers will even­tu­al­ly join this pro­gramme DR can on­ly guess, but it seems im­por­tant as an in­cen­tive to in­form them that, even with­out any as­sis­tance from FIDE, a grow­ing num­ber of coun­tries across the globe are en­hanc­ing their ed­u­ca­tion­al sys­tems by in­tro­duc­ing chess in­to the cur­ricu­lum of their schools.

They are in­spired to do so by the re­sults of sev­er­al ex­pert stud­ies which in­di­cate the sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion the world's great­est mind game can play in the ed­u­ca­tion of chil­dren.

Ac­cord­ing to Chess-In-The-Schools of New York, two stud­ies con­duct­ed by not­ed ed­u­ca­tion­al psy­chol­o­gist Stu­art M Mag­ulies, PhD demon­strat­ed that chil­dren who par­tic­i­pat­ed in the pro­gramme showed im­proved scores on stan­dard­ised tests.

"The gains were even greater among chil­dren with low or av­er­age ini­tial scores. Chil­dren who were in the non-chess play­ing group showed no gains," he not­ed.

The oth­er study showed over­all suc­cess rate of par­tic­i­pat­ing chil­dren was 91.4 per cent "in han­dling re­al life sit­u­a­tions with emo­tion­al in­tel­li­gence" as com­pared to 64.4 per cent for those who were not in­volved in the pro­gramme.

Com­ment­ing on the ini­tia­tive, Harold O. Levy, For­mer Chan­cel­lor, Board of Ed­u­ca­tion of New York City, said: "The Chess-in-the Schools pro­gramme has demon­strat­ed how through chess chil­dren can im­prove their con­cen­tra­tion, work habits, log­i­cal think­ing and oth­er skills re­lat­ed to school suc­cess."

In In­dia, the Mind­Cham­pi­ons' Acad­e­my (MCA), a joint non-prof­it ini­tia­tive be­tween World Cham­pi­on GM Viswanathan Anand and NI­IT Ltd, has over the last decade fos­tered over 8,000 chess clubs with more than 8,000,000 stu­dents as its mem­bers in schools across the coun­try.

For­mer World Cham­pi­on GM Gar­ry Kas­parov along with Pres­i­dent of the Eu­ro­pean Chess Union, Sil­vio Danilov, re­cent­ly re­ceived the sup­port of the Eu­ro­pean Com­mis­sion for Ed­u­ca­tion for es­tab­lish­ing a Eu­ro­pean-wide chess ed­u­ca­tion pro­gramme.

T&T teach­ers will now have an op­por­tu­ni­ty to en­joy the ex­cite­ment of the roy­al game them­selves and, at the same time, pro­mote a pro­gramme de­signed to en­hance the men­tal and psy­cho­log­i­cal strength of their young charges.


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