Chess in Education and Health

FIDE has just issued a new booklet, Chess - A Tool for Education and Health (fide.com).

This new 48 page booklet is now freely available to download as a PDF from cis.fide.com. In this new edition, we hope to disseminate throughout the worldwide chess community the benefits of education, health, as well as the use of chess in different social and therapeutic areas. We hope it serves as a letter of introduction, not only for amateurs, instructors and teachers, but also for the entire community that wants to know the work that is being carried out with chess as an educational and socialization tool.

The booklet overlaps many of the topics that we've seen on this blog in this ongoing series about The Sociology of Chess (November 2016). Here are its first two pages, the cover and the table of contents:-

If that table of contents is too small to read, here's the list in a more readable format:-

2 Morals of Chess
3 Chess in Bloom
4 Thinking Skills
5 Educational Cutlery
6 Critical & Creative Thinking - Chess in the Educational Process
7 Chess as a Teaching Tool
8 Educational Benefits of Chess
10 Psychomotor Skills
11 STEM Skills
12 Cognitive Abilities
13 Life Skills & Counselling
14 Ethical Sense
15 ADHD & Autism
16 Social Benefi ts & Minorities
18 Health Bene fits
19 Beating Cognitive Decline
20 Smart Girl Uganda
21 Queen of Katwe
22 Prisons - Chess That Brings Freedom
26 Alzheimer's - Checkmating Dementia
28 Teaching Programs - 4-6 Early Years Skills
30 Teaching Programs - 7-11 Planet Chess and others
32 Teacher Training
33 FIDE School Instructor title
34 FIDE School Chess Leader diploma
35 Support for Teachers
36 European Parliament
38 European Union – Erasmus+
39 European Chess Union
40 CiS Around the World
42 Chess & Education Conferences
44 Research
46 Bibliography

Several of these topics are controversial, for example 'Alzheimer's - Checkmating Dementia', a topic I last covered in More on Chess and Alzheimer's (July 2016). The FIDE booklet says,

Research among those over the age of 60 strongly suggests that chess is valuable in combating Alzheimer's.

The phrase 'strongly suggests' is less provocative than the usual phrase 'studies show', and I imagine that FIDE is making an effort to avoid adding fuel to the controversy. Other topics in the booklet show similar circumspection. For more about these topics on this blog, follow the links for 'Chess in School' Summarized (October 2016), and FIDE's Social Commissions 2017 (November 2017).