© 2002 Milton N. Bradley

As one of the world's great strategic board games, Chess shares certain important characteristics with Go that also makes it a valuable pedagogical adjunct to the standard curriculum, and it has often been used in that role outside the Orient in places where Go was unknown. As Shelby Lyman noted in his nationally syndicated Chess column in Long Island's premiere newspaper Newsday on Sept 10, 1991, "Chess works in an educational environment because ......it is a sport....and it is played for fun." He continued "... children playing Chess engage their full intellect, will and strength to a remarkable extent. They alertly attend the chessboard: observing, remembering, generating ideas, testing those ideas, making decisions and mistakes and learning from those mistakes." He concluded "Chess has an advantage over most school subjects: it combines both theory and practice. Ideas are honed and tested in the crucible of competitive play. Poor formulation or poor execution of ideas loses games. Careless, faulty thinking is ruthlessly refuted on the chessboard."

The validity of Lyman's contention that Chess can improve student performance was recently abundantly demonstrated in New York City's Mott Hall School, as reported by Brent Staples in the Sunday New York Times of Dec 15, 2002, and described in considerable detail in the section of this web page entitled "Teaching The New 'R' Of Reasoning".

Go is far superior to Chess as a pedagogical tool because it not only fully shares all of these considerable assets, but also possesses several others of transcendent importance that Chess lacks almost completely:

• Most readily apparent is Go's far greater accessibility, especially by the very young. It is free of all the artificial complexities (e.g. different piece moves, promotion, castling, en passant capture, etc.) that beset Chess. The structure of Go is as simple and almost as easy to learn in rudimentary fashion as Checkers, so it is possible for almost anyone to quickly and effortlessly begin playing it.

• The rigid starting setup of Chess vastly reduces the number of options available, thereby inhibiting the free flow of the player's imagination. In contrast, the Go board starts empty and the players create their own unique structure in every game, thus allowing full reign to their creativity and imagination.

• The simplistic objective of Chess of catching the opposing King together with its small 8 x 8 square scale and constricting starting lineup lead to a "quick kill" mentality in which the capture of some material or a successful "mating attack" on the opposing King can lead to an instant win. The result is a game that is very strongly biased toward the tactical, with very little opportunity for the development of much more than elemental strategy. In contrast, the 19 x 19 line Go board has enormous scale. Coupled with the need to trade off short term profits and their costs against the possibility of later achieving greater long term gain, this leads to incredibly profound strategy whose realization depends upon the precise execution of tactics every bit as incisive as those of Chess. This gives Go an entire dimension for intellectual development almost entirely lacking in Chess.

• Perhaps most important of all, the vast scale of the Go board makes it impossible to precisely calculate anticipated outcomes during the crucial opening stages of the game, and this requires the players to rely entirely upon general strategic principles and such right brain functions as pattern recognition and "instinct". This integration of right and left brain function provided by Go is crucial to the complete development of the brain, and is also almost completely lacking in Chess (or any other known human activity).

  This unique integration of left and right brain function in playing Go was recently directly demonstrated for the first time by MRI brain scans, in experiments described in the report referenced in the section of this web page "Comparison Between Chess and Go".

For these reasons, Go not only provides unlimited scope for even the most brilliant to exercise their mental capabilities to the fullest, but an effectiveness in improving the brain function and academic performance of even underachievers unmatched by any other known pedagogical mechanism.

Caveats

There are some significant caveats that must be addressed in implementing a school Go program, especially in the US:

• Most important is the realization that Go is not a form of magic wand, despite the enormous benefits that its participants ultimately enjoy. Mere brief exposure to the elegant basic concepts of Go and occasional casual play may be pleasurable, but will not result in substantive salutary changes in the student's thinking processes or study habits!

  The benefits Go provides can only be achieved over a period of months and years during which the student actively studies and plays Go, and progresses well into the advanced stages of skill. The reason is that a deep understanding of and ability to appropriately address the complex interactions between Go's strategy, tactics, and elegant structural concepts are what actually improve the student's intellectual capabilities. Coupled with Go's subtle development and inculcation of improved study habits, this then translates into improved academic performance.

• It is this "rewiring" of the brain to enable it to efficiently engage in the kind of advanced REASONING essential to both playing Go and solving real world problems that is most readily accomplished at about age 4 or 5. As noted in some detail in the section of this web page "Teaching The New 'R' Of Reasoning", the ideal learning method for such young children is largely but not wholly informal, supplemented by a small irreducible minimum of formal instruction. Unfortunately, the ideal combination of conditions to permit using this preferred method does not routinely exist anywhere in the US today outside a very few Oriental communities. Therefore there is no practical alternative to a more formal, intrinsically less desirable (but still effective) approach.

• In Japan, Go is a well established and highly respected cultural/social activity and almost every child is already aware of its existence long before entering school, so participation in an in-school Go program is fairly readily obtained and accepted. In the US Go is almost completely unknown to all but a few students of Oriental extraction. Far worse, in our basically anti-intellectual society, activities like playing Go are also often characterized by many students and parents as "nerdy", and are viewed disapprovingly. Overcoming this erroneous negative preconception may constitute a formidable challenge, at least until the program is well established and its value demonstrated beyond question.

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