Here’s an interesting article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about Laszlo Polgár, a Hungarian who set out to turn his daughters into chess prodigies, and succeeded. A few interesting quotes:

There are three Polgár sisters, Zsuzsa (Susan), Zsofia (Sofia), and Judit: all chess prodigies, raised by Laszlo and Klara in Budapest during the Cold War. Rearing them in modest conditions, where a walk to the stationery store was a great event, the Polgárs homeschooled their girls, defying a skeptical and chauvinist Communist system. They lived chess, often practicing for eight hours a day. By the end of the 1980s, the family had become a phenomenon: wealthy, stars in Hungary and, when they visited the United States, headline news…

Laszlo believed that physical fitness was vital to intellectual success, so the girls played table tennis several hours a day, on top of their full day of chess and schooling. The parents were tireless in their devotion, buying every chess book they could, cutting out pages with past games, gluing them to cards, and storing it all in an old card catalog. They assembled more than 100,000 games; at the time, only the Soviet Union’s restricted chess archive could match it…

By the late 1980s, researchers had established that, contrary to what you might imagine, chess masters don’t tend to anticipate more moves as they gain skill. Rather, they gain expertise in recognizing patterns of the board, and patterns built out of those patterns. A question remained, however: How do they gain those skills? …

The focus of the article is on “nature vs. nurture” and the “10,000 hour rule” or “practice makes perfect”. What caught my attention though is the idea that children have a natural aptitude for pattern recognition. And systems are about patterns. I am thinking about H.T. Odum’s beautiful system diagrams, which are essentially circuits depicting the energy flows through any type of system. The building blocks are simple but they can be combined to describe very complex behavior in systems of any physical type. (Odum would have said they describe all the important aspects of social and economic systems too, but I haven’t decided if I agree with that yet.) So if young children of roughly average mental aptitude can memorize patterns in chess, could they learn to memorize Odum’s system patterns through repetition, perhaps through games? And if all children learned general systems theory in this way, could they be prodigies in solving the world’s complex problems later on? Are we focusing on entirely the wrong things in school?