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Chessville
Chess
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Scholastics and the Soul of Chess by Tom Braunlich The controversial new article Scholastics and the Soul of Chess: Is Scholastic Chess Killing Tournament Chess, or Saving It? presents what to some people might seem surprising — detailed criticisms of the scholastic chess movement. It is 24-page article, heavily researched, in journalistic style. I invite all adult chess fans to read it and consider the seldom-discussed issues it develops. It is natural to perhaps look around at all the huge scholastic mega-events and ask:
But many people have been perplexed to learn that the answers to those questions are:
The USCF often points with pride at having now grown to over 90,000 members. What often isn’t said is recent growth is all scholastic — well over 50,000 now are scholastic (under 14) or youth members (under 19) — on average an elementary school kid with a rating of 627. Only some 36,000 are adults. Yet, as the article shows in detail, nearly all of these scholastic kids drop out of chess before high school ends. There is virtually no transfer of scholastic to adult memberships. In fact, real adult membership in the USCF has been on a steady decline for years, and the average age of adult members has been rising steadily (an alarming demographic stat).
I have learned that most USCF adult members don’t bother to follow scholastic chess and thus don’t really understand what it is. Like me, they have always assumed that it is just a “better organized” version of what used to be known as “junior” chess back in the old days. But this isn’t true. Scholastic Chess is something brand new that started in the 1980s — a creation of educators, not chess players. They think of chess as an educational tool. They see it as a “Social Good”, not as a “sport”, and use it for their own purposes. They recruit kids into chess who have no previous or permanent interest in the game and get them jazzed up about tournaments in the style of Searching for Bobby Fischer in order to teach them the educational benefits that the study of chess has been shown to have. That’s all fine and good, and the article discusses these benefits in detail.
But from the point of view of the chess sportsman — those of us who want to see talented young players grow up to enrich the chess world — it is critical to realize that educators only are teaching chess in order to spread its educational benefits, NOT to enhance chess itself. They could care less about nurturing future masters, or what affect they are having upon the regular flow of talented “junior” players that chess has always attracted but who now come under the guidance of educators rather than chess mentors. The brand of chess educators teach can be criticized by a chess sportsman in many ways, including their de-emphasis of developing a competitive and winning attitude, their strong reward of mediocrity, and perhaps most important of all, their tendency to ignore the talented players in favor of the large “mass” of kids that are their target. The article discusses these criticisms in detail and provide good reasons for chess lovers to wonder whether Scholastic Chess is not doing more harm than good to our young talented junior players who do get mixed up in it. But that is just the tip of the scholastic iceberg. The real concerns are under the surface, including the unreported monetary proceeds from the huge scholastic mega-events, and the affects upon USCF governance that the scholastic movement has been building. The article details how the USCF doesn’t know if it makes money on scholastic chess, despite the obvious reality that these events are a huge cash cow. They do not break out costs or income that is scholastic-related, preventing observers from determining just how much time and effort the USCF is spending in these areas as opposed to its traditional missions. There is BIG money in scholastic chess. Where is it all going? Nobody knows.
It is easy to scoff at the idea of scholastics taking over the USCF. But the article supports the fear with many chilling examples. For instance, remember the ACF? — the American Chess Foundation that for many decades was a giant supporter of master-level chess in the U.S.? It recently changed its name to Chess-in-the-Schools and is now focusing its efforts almost completely on scholastic chess in the New York inner-city school system, despite the fact that the millions of dollars of donations that funded the foundation were not originally meant for this purpose. They were apparently taken over by scholastic interests. The article presents other examples and a variety of opinions about the USCF’s future under the onslaught of scholastic chess numbers, including four possible scenarios. These of course are rather speculative, but are intended to be thought-provoking and to encourage people to think about where the USCF should be going and what we must do to get it there. So I invite
all of you to
read the
article, consider the issues, and possibly get involved yourself!
Share your thoughts with
The Parrot, and see what other
readers have to say! See what some our readers had to say on the subject.
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The final
section of the article looks into the political ramifications on adult
American chess from the scholastic chess movement, which have been huge and
yet which are never questioned. There are many who believe that the
USCF is already turning into a scholastic organization, and the recent
proposal to merge the USCF with the AF4C (