20.08.2019

Ilyumzhinov’s ideas live and develop

In December 2015, a Kommersant reporter asked Kirsan Ilyumzhinov:

- Kirsan Nikolaevich, one of the key FIDE programmes is “Chess in schools”. Why is it so important for you that chess shall be taught at schools?
- I announced this programme in Khanty-Mansiysk in 2010. I said that I had completed the main tasks set before me in the mid-1990s. I made sure that the IOC recognized chess as a sport, unified the chess world and introduced a new championship system.

 

Now it is the time for a next step. I set a goal to bring the number of people playing chess to one billion in next ten years. Chess shall be taught from childhood: at schools and kindergartens... (end of quote).

As we reported, Ilyumzhinov opened a FIDE chess school three years ago on 4 August 2016.
For the last three years, the younger generation of Kuzminskiy Otverzhek of the Lipetsk region has been winning prizes in schoolchildren chess championships. This is a result of the social project "Chess universal education." The project is developed by the regional chess federation together with the regional department of education and science. One of its initiators in the Lipetsk region is a head of a chess club, candidate for master of sports, First Category arbiter Mikhail Geranichev. Now he conducts classes in three villages for about forty children altogether. He says that from the first day he set a goal to instil a love of chess in every student.
“This is one of the most effective sports educational disciplines. Many countries include chess in the school curriculum. Teachers note the positive impact of chess on children's performance in all subjects. It is proved that studying chess contributes to the formation of a harmonious personality and develops spatial thinking, strategic planning skills, endurance, fighting qualities and mathematical abilities,” Mikhail says.
He presented his vision of the project’s prospects at the youth forum.
“The idea to teach every second-grader to play chess was proposed by the sixth president of the International Chess Federation (FIDE) Kirsan Ilyumzhinov and approved by the region authorities. The difference between the “Chess at school” project and other chess educational programmes is that it is aimed not at raising professional grandmasters but at shaping the intellectual and moral culture of schoolchildren,” Mikhail says.
In order for the project to work at full capacity, it is necessary first to purchase chess sets, textbooks and workbooks, set up a curriculum and, of course, train the teachers. The administration of the Lipetsk region expressed its interest in the implementation of the project.