LASKER BOOK

I'M VERY VERY SURE THIS IS FROM LASKER's BOOK MANUAL OF CHESS:
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FINAL REFLECTIONS ON EDUCATION IN CHESS.

Education in Chess goes on in a most haphazard fashion. Most Chess players slowly climb to a certain rather low level and stay there. Of players to whom a master can give odds of a Queen there are millions; players of greater skill number probably no more than a quarter of a million. If we reckon the number of Rook players as a hundred and fifty thousand, of Knight players as fifty thousand, of Pawn and two-move players as forty thousand, of pawn and move players as nine thousand, and the number of those to whom no master can allow odds, as one thousand, we are possibly not very far wrong. Now let us consider the efforts made to attain this result: a literature of many thousand volumes, hundreds, maybe thousands, of Chess columns in widely read newspapers and magazines, lectures, tournaments, tournament books, courses of instruction, matches in the clubs and between clubs and cities and countries, by correspondence, by telegraph and telephone, thousands of coffee - houses, where spectators, amid lively gossip, look on, make notes, analyze - truly an imposing expenditure.

One should not take these facts too easily. Certainly, in spite of its capacities, Chess is only a game and not to be classed with business, science, technology, not to speak of religion, philosophy or the arts. No one desires to see players devote to Chess such time as they need for serious purposes. The waste of time in Chess would not matter, were it not a symptom of a sickness that has befallen our culture.

We have learnt how to organise manufacturing plants, but our general education, our mental work, our economy of ideals are not better than our education in Chess.

I will here not wail. I will only illuminate a connection, even though rapidly. Chess, from its very inception, has had coherence with Life.

Let us assume that a master who follows a good method, say, the method of this book, strives to educate a young man ignorant of Chess to the level of one who, if conceded any odds, would surely come out the winner. How much time would the teacher need for this achievement? I think that I am correct in making the following calculation:

Rules of Play and Exercises 5 hrs.

Elementary Endings 5 hrs.

Some Openings 10 hrs.

Combination 20 hrs.

Position Play 40 hrs.

Play and Analysis 120 hrs.

Even if the young man has no talent at all, by following the above course he would advance to the class specified. Compare with this possibility, the reality. In fact, there are a quarter of a million Chess amateurs who devote to Chess at least two hundred hours ever year and of these only a thousand, after a lifetime of study, attain the end. Without losing myself in calculations, I believe I am safe in voicing the opinion that our efforts in Chess attain only a hundredth of one per cent of their rightful result.

Our education, in all domains of endeavour, is frightfully wasteful of time and values. In Mathematics and in Physics the results arrived at are still worse than in Chess. Is there a tendency to keep the bulk of the people stupid? For governments of an autocratic type the foolishness of the multitude has always been an asset. Possibly, also the mediocre who happen to be in authority follow the same policy. This motif, it is true, is not predominating in Chess. The bad state of education in Chess is due entirely to our backwardness.

Education in Chess has to be an education in independent thinking and judging. Chess must not be memorized, simply because it is not important enough. If you load your memory, you should know why. Memory is too valuable to be stocked with trifles. Of my fifty-seven years I have applied at least thirty to forgetting most of what I had learned or read, and since I succeeded in this I have acquired a certain ease and cheer which I should never again like to be without. If need be, I can increase my skill in Chess, if need be I can do that of which I have no idea at present. I have stored little in my memory, but I can apply that little, and it is of good use in many and varied emergencies. I keep it in order, but resist every attempt to increase its dead weight.

You should keep in mind no names, nor numbers, nor isolated incidents, not even results, but only methods. The method is plastic. It is applicable in every situation. The result, the isolated incident, is rigid, because bound to wholly individual conditions. The method produces numerous results; a few of these will remain in our memory, and as long as they remain few, they are useful to illustrate and to keep alive the rules which order a thousand results. Such useful results must be renewed from time to time just as fresh food has to be supplied to a living organism to keep it strong and healthy. But results useful in this manner have a living connection with rules, and these again are discovered by applying a live method: the whole of this organisation must have life, more than that -- a harmonious life.

This harmonious life stems from life; life is generated only by life. He who wants to educate himself in Chess must evade what is dead in Chess -- artificial theories, supported by few instances and unheld by an excess of human wit; the habit of playing with inferior opponents; the custom of avoiding difficult tasks; the weakness of uncritically taking over variations or rules discovered by others; the vanity which is self-sufficient; the incapacity for admitting mistakes; in brief, everything that leads to a standstill or to anarchy.

Acquisition of harmonious education is comparable to the production and the elevation of an organism harmoniously built. The one is fed by blood, the other one by the spirit; but Life, equally mysterious, creative, powerful, flows through either. This comparison is no mere rhetorical imagery; it is a programme.

True, this programme, valid for all education, is in no way restricted to Chess; only a second postulate added to the above singles out Chess among all other things to be taught. It is this: to lead the pupil along the paths of the theory of Steinitz.

This theory has a history which the pupil should strive to understand because it lifts the veil a little from the mystery of human character; this theory has a meaning which became manifest after a hard contest with competing theories and won authority through a celebrated world's championship match; this theory has connections with profound problems; this theory asks the pupil to think for himself and to construct his own table of values and to keep it constantly, vigilantly, in order; this theory demands of him boldness and caution and force and economy and thus becomes to him a model for actions outside of Chess.

The road to this education requires good teachers -- masters of Chess who at the same time are geniuses of teaching. But it pays to go along this road for it leads to a country of men who judge independently, act boldly and aspire after noble ideals.

How should these teachers follow their avocation? In introducing young men into the game in the right manner by lectures, good books, by live play with their pupils, by assisting at matches of the pupils and making notes and comments on the good and weak points of the games played; in short, by thus facilitating the thinking of their pupil without doing violence to it. The ways in which a good teacher may do efficient work are manifold and varied.

The Chess world has the task of breeding such teachers and, as soon as this is accomplished, to support them in their efforts. Thus the Chess-world would ease the hard life of the Chess-masters who must make a profession of Chess provided they want to do their best for Chess. But who wants to stop half-way? Who would want these Chess-masters who have the capacity for excellent teaching in them to become mediocre in Chess only in order to make them mediocre in some other profession? The function of a Chess-master, who would be principally a Chess-teacher, is useful and pleasing. It is to the individual credit of Chess that in other domains of human activity, at least up to the present, teachers of the above type are not even possible.

On the Future of the Theory of Steinitz.

It is easy to mould the theory of Steinitz into mathematical symbols by inventing a kind of Chess, the rules and regulations of which are themselves expressed by mathematical symbols. The Japanese game of Go is very nearly what I mean. In such a game the question, whether thorough analysis would confirm the theory of Steinitz or not, presumably could be quickly solved because the power of modern mathematics is exceedingly great.

The instant that this solution is worked out, humanity stands before the gate of an immense new science which prophetic philosophers have called the mathematics or the physics of contest.

The contests fought nowadays by men -- war, diplomatic negotiation, competition in manufacture, disputes in the press, to name just a few -- are conducted very amateurishly. That wars should appear to us a necessity is proof of our stupidity. True, humanity has need of a test for progress, for right, for soundness of ethics in human affairs, but that need can be satisfied in other and more efficient ways than by war. To make this evident is difficult only because men do not want to know the truth. But this task will be an easy one as soon as the science of contest attains recognition.

To outlaw war will be possible because humanity has a wealth of efficient and useful means to fill the gap that would be left. The competition between research workers, inventors, discoverers, artists, statesmen causes the flow of blood in the body of culture. And this competition will retain its vigour till many centuries after the time that Victor Hugo pictures, when cannons will have been stored in museums alongside of the instruments of torture to serve as memorials of a vanished barbaric epoch.

The mathematics of Chess does not, it is true, solve the problem of comprehending the contests of Life, but it sets that problem in precise terms and points to a solution. There the leverage will be supported whence investigators will set scientific research into motion. The first step is always the essential one. With the law of the lever by Archimedes came statics, with the law of the falling stone by Galileo arose dynamics, and their course, though their entry into the world was so modest, led them to revolutionise all science and all modes of living irrespective of the obstacles that hatred and stupidity heaped into their path. The science of contest will progress irresistibly, as soon as its first modest success has been scored.

It is desirable that institutes to further these ends should be erected. Such institutes would have to work upon a mass of material already extant: theory of mathematical games, of organisation, of the conduct of business, of dispute, of negotiation; they would have to breed teachers capable of elevating the multitude from its terrible dilettantism in matters of contest; they would have to produce books of instruction and for reading as plain, as intelligible, as valuable as Knigge's _Social Intercourse Amongst Mankind_. (_Umgang mit Menschen_) or Labruyere's _Characters_.

Such an institute should be founded by every people who want to make themselves fit for a sturdier future and at the same time to aid the progress and the happiness of all humankind.

These plans are not at all fantastic; they will certainly be realised at some time. Why not now? Let us hope that also in these days of all-round mediocrity Reason is not wholly without partisans."
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