Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Benefits
R number 1: To play chess competitively according to the international rules of FIDE, a player must write down his
moves.
R number 2: As a player continues to compete, he will experience many losses. Dissatisfied, the player will seek to sharpen his skill and stop repeating the mistakes of the past by reading books on chess.
R number 3: To get better at chess, a player must be able to keep score. He starts the game with eight pawns. As the game progresses, pieces get swapped, and pawns get pushed forward and lost. He now has two Rooks and four pawns left for a point count of 14 (5+5+4), and his opponent has a Rook, a Bishop, a Knight, and five pawns for a point count of 16 (5+3+3+5). The opponent therefore has a material advantage of two. Simple. He has just used arithmetic.
R number 4: The player undertakes these first three R's because it is his responsibility. No one else's. When playing chess, the player has no excuses for his blunders. A teammate didn't drop a perfect pass or miss a shot. He and only he is responsible.
R number 5: The last R is also the most important. Suppose the player's Queen is attacked. If he doesn't move it, the Queen will be captured. If he pulls it back in retreat, it will be safe. If he moves it forward, the Queen can capture a pawn and still be safe. He decides to go for the pawn, and in making his decision, he exercises his powers of reasoning.
These five R's combine to produce that which all education is about: critical thinking. When you get right down to it, education has two elements:
1) Information
2) Information processing. Information by itself is worthless. It is the critical thinking that allows us to process the information that gives the information its value.
