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• 15th March 2020
• 45 minute(s) read

How To Become A Genius- The Polgár Experiment

In this article I write about the unbelievable story of the Polgár’s. The family who successfully created three geniuses on purpose.

A girl walks into a bar…

In the summer of 1973, a father and his daughter walked into a chess club in Budapest.  1

The club was full of heavy cigarette smoke and elderly men who came there day after day to play chess.

The father approached the gentlemen.

The old men could not believe their ears when they heard László Polgár challenge them to play against his four-year-old daughter, Susan Polgár.

László put a pillow that he brought from home on one of the chairs so his daughter could reach the table.

The old chess foxes could not believe their eyes when little Susan won one match after another.

Who the hell was this kid?

The First Female Chess Grandmaster

Thirty years later Susan Polgár, the world’s first female chess grandmaster was ready to give her usual Thursday night lecture at the New York Chess club when she announced to the room, “I have a special treat for you tonight!“. 2

“Tonight, everyone will get to play me“ Susan, 36 said with a gentle, but confident smile on her face to all the other chess players in the room.

The atmosphere in the room tensed, everybody transformed from student to competitor.

Everyone except Susan.

They were playing blitz chess, a form of chess where they not only played against one of the best chess players of all time in Susan Polgár but also against the clock.

First in line, was a young Serbian who tried to play aggressively, Susan managed to beat him in no time.

The young man stood up, shook his head in confusion, and made room for the next one.

It took Susan minutes to defeat her next two opponents, the last one to beat was a reluctant and shy teenage chess student.

While defeating him, she mentored him by saying, “Once you have a winning position, play with your hands, not your head.  Trust your intuition“.

When Susan was the age of the boy, she already dominated the adult chess world and crushed competitor after competitor. 2

When she was 16 years old, Susan participated in the New York Open Chess competition, a prestigious tournament for the best of the best.

Although Susan was dominating her competition, as usual, there were two other participants in the tournament who caused quite the fuzz: Susan’s 11-year-old sister Sophia, and her 9-year-old sister Judit.

In particular, little Judit left the crowd in awe, when the 9-year old battled five players at the same time while being blindfolded.

The success of the Polgár’s did not go unnoticed, and Susan appeared on the cover of the New York Times shortly after the tournament.

By the time she was 21, Susan had become the first woman ever to earn the title of Grandmaster from the World Chess Federation.

In 2002, her sister Judit Polgár’, who by then was ranked as the eighth-best players in the world, would win against the reigning champion and living chess legend Gary Kasparov.

The same chess master who said earlier:

Women, by their nature, are not exceptional chess players: they are not great fighters.“ Gary Kasparov

But did he have a point?  After all, only 11 out of the world’s 950 grandmasters are female. 3

Are the Polgár’s sisters born prodigies, who by a twist of genetic fate, were blessed with more talent than others?

This assumption could not be further from the truth…

Letters To Klara

47 years before Judit beat Gary Kasparov, László Polgár, a Hungarian psychologist and father of the three chess prodigies wrote a series of letters to a Ukrainian foreign language teacher named Klara.

The letters were not filled with Shakespearean declarations of eternal love; instead, they revolved around a precise and unprecedented pedagogical experiment that László wanted to conduct with his unborn children.

After studying the lives and achievements of over four hundred of the greatest intellectuals of our time, László believed he had identified the secret ingredient to high achievement: early and intensive specialisation in a particular subject. 4

A genius is not born but is educated and trained….When a child is born healthy, it is a potential genius”.  -László Polgár

László rejected the idea of innate talent, and he believed that the public school system could only be successful in producing mediocre minds.

He had the idea that with hard work and the right kind of environment, everybody could become a genius.

László’s plan of proving the world wrong impressed Klara, and she got on board with the experiment of grooming three geniuses, and shortly after they got married and Klara got pregnant.

The Polgár’s decided that chess would be the perfect activity for their experiment; after all, only 1% of the top chess players in the world were women at that time.

In 1974, Klara gave birth to Sophie, 21 months later, Judit was born.

Soon after being born, the sibling’s curiosity was sparked by seeing their father teaching chess to Susan, the oldest of the three sisters.

They became interested in chess as a consequence, and with that, Polgár had not only one but three “subjects“.

So, how good did the three sisters do in chess?

Well, not bad, I would say.

After being recognised as the top-ranked female chess player in the world, Susan Polgár was the first woman in history to win the Chess Triple Crown, and the first one to qualify for the Men’s World Championship in 1986.

The second daughter, Sofia Polgár, went on to become a top ten female chess player in the world, and she also beat several other male grandmasters during her career.

Finally came Judit Polgár, born in 1976, she achieved the highest chess results among the three legendary sisters.

Judit is nowadays widely recognised as the strongest female chess player of all time.

She was also the one who broke Bobby Fischer’s record when she became at the age of 15, the youngest grandmaster of all time.

The childhood of the Polgár sisters was extraordinary, and it challenges the idea that nature trumps over nurture.

Are Geniuses Born Or Are They Made?

László’s crazy and maybe unethical experiment was successful in his attempt to “produce“ miracle children.

I would even go so far as to say that the Polgár family refuted the idea that geniuses are the mere consequence of biological flukes.

In that regard, László’s Polgár proved his theory that he made over 50 years ago, which states: genius-level performers are not born, they are made.

In case nobody ever told you this: there is a genius sleeping in your heart who waits to be awakened.

But it is not going to wake up by itself.

But what can you do to become everything you can be?

Before we discuss the psychological makeup of a genius, let us first identify what a genius is…

What Is A Genius?

If I am not for me – who is then for me; but if I am only for me – why do I live?” – The Talmud “The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something about it.  Chaos breeds geniuses.  It offers a man something to be a genius about”.- B.F. Skinner “Genius is the recovery of childhood at will”.  – Arthur Rimbaud

While we, up to this day, have not agreed on a scientifically precise definition of a genius, we all know intuitively what a genius is. 5

Or so do we believe.

The first thing that comes to mind when we think of the word genius is a super nerd, a la Stephan Hawking or Albert Einstein, a person who is born with superior or intellectual talent, who was predestined to achieve what normal people could never achieve.

Many psychologists believed that the intellectual superiority of outstanding people has its origins in the anatomy of their brain.

After Einstein’s death, for example, a team of psychologists analysed his grey organ anatomically (weight, volume, and folding of the brain), but they did not find anything that was not normal. 6

So, if it is not the brain itself, what is it?

Since László Polgár dedicated his life to the idea that geniuses can be produced, let us listen to his parameters:

Genius = Work + Luck + Favourable Circumstances Every healthy child may be led to the summit.  The fact that the majority of children can learn a new language between the ages of 1 – 2 proves this.  Think about it, is this not an achievement of genius?  If they continue, at the age of 10, they can speak 5-6 languages.  This genius results firstly from education and self-education.  The opinion of world-famous geniuses also confirms this assertion.  Let me cite some examples: T.A. Edison: “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”. Ch. Chaplin: “Talent is nothing; discipline is everything”. Cuvier: “Genius is firstly attention”. Gorkiy: “Talent is the love of work”. J.S. Bach: “Anyone can achieve my level if he is a diligent as I have been my entire life”. J.W. Goethe: “Genius?  Probably merely diligence”.

de Balzac: “Every human talent consists of two parts: patience and time”.

According to László Polgár, being genius is not an inborn trait; it is a level everybody can achieve in theory.

Yes, also you.

He identified three different levels that a person has to overcome:

A fully realised genius is the same, in my opinion, as an outstanding person.  An outstanding person differs on the one hand quantitatively from the average (they know much more than the average person), and on the other hand, they realize in society a more valuable, more original creativity.  Being outstanding comes in different stages.  I distinguish three: Candidates or pre-geniuses (1-5% of every domain) Geniuses (0.2 -0.5 % of every domain) Super-genius (1 in every domain) Thus follows: The handicapped Idiots: very retarded mentally Imbeciles: moderately mentally retarded Feeble-minded: a little mentally retarded The normal Adequate people: minor capability Average people: natural Capable people: more capability The outstanding (geniuses) Unusually capable: candidate or pre-geniuses Super-capable: geniuses Extraordinarily capable: super-geniuses Of course, these divisions are only relative.  Obviously, every concrete person can move from one category to another.

What does this mean? 

This means that once you have identified an area of your life that you want to master, there are different milestones that you can achieve to work yourself up to the level of a genius.

Read that sentence again.

In the case of the Polgár’s, their parameters were, of course, chess related.

For chess, these success steps are precise and measurable; one of the reasons why Polgár choose this particular domain.

There is a system that is called “Elo Points“, and it measures how good a chess player is. 7

• –  Super-geniuses (above 2650 Elo Points)
• –  Geniuses (2550-2650 Elo Points)
• –  Candidate geniuses (2450-2550 Elo Points)

All three Polgár sisters had stretches where they were playing at a super-genius level.

This indicates that every domain has levels that we can climb, this means that no genius is just born, they climb the ladder, and they can fall off the ladder of success if they stop practising their craft.

The purpose of this article is for you to learn about Polgár’s blueprint and apply it to your personal domain of interest so that you can become a genius in your field.

In the following part of this article, we are going to deconstruct what characteristics you can emulate from the Polgár’s to maximise your potential,

The five-ingredients of a genius that you are going to find in the next part of this article, are derived from my observation of the beautiful story about this wonderful family, of course, they do not represent their ideas but mine.

Ingredient One – Rage To Master

Many things can be acquired with money, many by deceit, and many by falsehood.  But there is one thing that can be obtained only by honest labour, for which a king must work as hard as a coalman… and that is knowledge”.  – The Talmud “A true scientist lives a monastic life, separate from the affairs of the world, dedicating himself completely to his work. ” – László Polgár “Instruction without discipline is like a windmill without water ” – Comenius

While I mainly focused on the positive parts of Polgár’s experiment in this article, it is impossible to read about the three miracle sisters without acknowledging the amount of hard work they invested into the development of their craft.

The Polgár’s possessed something that Ellen Winner, a psychologist from Boston College, calls the “rage to master”.

A trait that can be defined as an unstoppable motivation to excel in a domain of interest. 8

I had an inner drive; I think that is the difference between the very good and the best”.  Susan Polgár

Was this rage to master something the Polgár’s were born with or was it something that was developed?

I believe it was the latter.

One way I can see the three children develop the rage to master, was when László Polgár put his children in a 24 Chess Marathon in Dresden:

In 1985 only Zsuzsa and in 1986 also her two younger sisters played in the tournament, Zsuzsa was 15, Zsofi was 9 and a half, and Judit 8).  According to the rules, they had to play 100 matches in 24 hours, so they had to keep attentive with great effort, practically without rest.  (There were only three short 20-minute pauses for food).  Added to this, they had to sit at the chess table after a 16-hour train journey. László Polgár

With challenges like this, it is no wonder that the children developed an extraordinary persistence.

It again shows that great people are not born; they are forged.

Every successful person has been a fanatic at some point in their lives; the Polgár’s are no exception.

Nothing was given to them; everything was earned.

If the chest pieces of the three sisters could talk, they would tell you about the endless hours of practice, the many moments where they did not feel like showing up but still did.

The pawns would sing about defeat, about sweat, about tears, about obsession, and about the heavy burden of being born to a father who has crushing expectations.

It is also impossible to overlook the insane work ethic of the father, László Polgár himself:

As concerns my view of life: I have worked 15 hours a day since I was 14.  For me, quality is the main thing.  I wish to do everything always at the highest level.  Mediocrity, the orientation to the middle, I refuse out of principle.  I strive for the summit despite obstacles, obeying the admonition of Michel de Montaigne: “In a great storm, sailors in ancient times invoked Neptune: O God!  You will save or destroy me according to your will.  But whatever you will, I will steer my ship as necessary!”

Human beings are imitators; we learn through observation.

The opinion of Albert Banduras, one of the most famous behaviourists of all time,  also confirms this assertion:

Fortunately, most human behaviour is learned observationally through modelling from others”.  – Albert Banduras.

In the video below, you will find The Bobo Doll, an experiment that shows that the quality of our behaviour often comes down to the quality of people we are surrounded by. 9

Ingredient Two – Deliberate Practice

The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones”.  Confucius “Do not let the sun set without doing something”.  Latin Proverb “We must believe that we are talented in some area and we must absolutely attain it”.  M. Curie

In 1985, Benjamin Bloom, a professor of education at the University of Chicago, investigated the critical factors that contributed to talent. 10

In his book, “ Developing Talent in Young People” , he takes a deep look at the upbringing of 120 elite performers who had won international competitions.

Bloom found that there were absolutely no early indicators that could have predicted genius-level success, not even IQ.

What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn if provided with appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.“ Benjamin Bloom

The only difference Bloom found was that extraordinary performers had practised intensively, studied with dedicated teachers, and had been supported enthusiastically through their developing years.

Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, argues that “extended deliberate practice” is the true key to success.

Ericsson interviewed  78 German pianists and violinists and discovered that by the age of 20, the most successful artists had spent approximately 10,000 hours on polishing their craft, on average 5,000 more than a less accomplished group. 11

Even the most motivated and intelligent student will advance more quickly under the tutelage of someone who knows the best order in which to learn things, who understand and can demonstrate the proper way to perform various skills, who can provide useful feedback, and who can devise practice activities designed to overcome particular weaknesses.” ― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

All three of the Polgár’s had amassed over 10,000 hours of deliberate practice by the age of 12. 12

Deliberate practice does not mean to simply live in a cave and study blindly; watching every episode of Emergency Room will not make you a doctor.

When most people practise, they focus on the things they already know how to do; deliberate practice is different.

What all three Polgár’s had in common was that they were not only working hard but also smart.

After every loss, they deconstructed the match and investigated what they did wrong so they could weed out their weaknesses and become better incrementally.

While starting at an early age can definitively be an advantage, I find it unbelievably refreshing to learn that with hard work and the right strategy, we can actually climb the mountain of success.

Leo Tolstoy (1847–1910), once observed that the people who asked him if they had what it takes to write a book, never actually tried to write one.

Mainstream media is full of overnight success stories, but when we take a closer look at the admired “naturals“, we always find that they have spent an incredible amount of time and energy into the strategical improvement of their craft.

While this iceberg of work might feel intimidating, it is important to notice that the ladder of success is climbable and that it will not take forever to get to the top.

10,000 hours is not forever, so if you do not have anything better to do, why not start TODAY at mastering your craft.

Ingredient Three – Choice Architecture

A person who shapes his environment shapes his destiny, his society and himself. ” László Polgár “Other people are among the most elementary needs of the person. ” K. Marx “Through others, we become ourselves”. Lev S. Vygotsky

The second and most obvious reason for the Polgár’s extraordinary development was that they grew up in a chess factory.

Thousands of chess books were stuffed into the shelves, trophies and posters hung everywhere.

Entire walls were cluttered with records of previous games for unlimited analytical pleasure.

Paintings that depicted 19th-century chess scenes could be found in many rooms.

The Polgár’s home was like a carefully designed and permanent chess boot camp:

The motivation for succeeding in chess was just there in the atmosphere of our house” Susan Polgár

While motivation plays a big role in mastering any field, the environment we are surrounded by seems to affect us even more.

While writing a chapter about the impact of our environment for my upcoming book, “ The Behaviour Architect” (coming soon), I interviewed Dr Anne Thorndike, a medical professor at Harvard University for The Psychology Podcast with Daniel Karim.

Dr Thorndike and her colleagues believe that it is possible to improve the eating habits of thousands of hospital employees and visitors without the slightest bit of motivational manipulation. 13

Dr Thorndike and her colleagues designed a six-month study where they altered the “choice architecture” of the hospital cafeteria.

They started by relocating the drinks in the room.  Before the study, the refrigerators stood next to the cash registers, and they were filled with soda only.

The research team now added water as an option to each refrigerator, and additionally placed a basket of bottled water next to each food station across the room.

While the unhealthy soda was still in the refrigerators, now the staff and visitors had the choice of taking water instead.

The image above shows you how Dr Thorndike and her colleagues manipulated the environment to get people to make healthier choices without even talking to them.  To the left, you see the room before the changes (Figure A), and to the right, you see the room after the changes (Figure A).  The dark boxes indicate where water was available.

What did they find?

Over the next three months, water sales increased by 25.8%, while soda sales dropped by 11.4%.

What we can learn from Dr Thorndike’s work and from the choice architecture of László Polgár, is that where we are, determines what we do.

B.F Skinner knew this almost 80 years ago when he said:

The ideal of behaviourism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behaviour that benefits everyone.“

A threatening realisation isn’t it?

After all, we all have been brought up with the idea of the American dream that states that the world is a fair and just place, and everybody can achieve their dream.

But in reality, our environment either makes or breaks us.

In 2018, my family had to learn that this principle cuts both ways.

At the end of that year, my father, a cigar connoisseur, bought himself a beautiful humidor.

Due to his love of cigars, my father believed it would be a good idea to invest a ton of money in giving his little babies a better home.

He placed the humidor on his English desk, where now, always in reach, he had an endless supply of perfectly freshly moistened cigars.

Pre-purchase, it was one of his rituals, to once a day, to leave his work behind and go to the cigar store to chat with his trusted cigar dealer about life and enjoy his break with a little puff.

After my father purchased the humidor, all he had to do was to spin his English chair around to grab a cigar whenever he felt like it.

One month after the purchase, my father was smoking four cigars a day.

Two months after the purchase, my father had a heart attack and found himself in the hospital.

Luckily, he survived.

Consciously, my father did not choose to smoke more, he knew very well that one cigar a day was risky enough, but because he chose to reshape his environment, unknowingly, he created an environment for himself which promoted smoking to the degree that nearly ended him.

What I am trying to say by this story: the results you currently produce are indicators for the quality of your environment.

Ask yourself right now:

To what kind of judgment would a stranger come to if they would observe your living environment?

If they would take a look at your room, what would they assume about you?

If they would take a look at your friends to predict your future, what kind of future would they prophesize for you?

Just like the Polgár’s transformed their home into a chess shrine, you need to align your living environment with your goals.

Here are a few ways you could redesign your environment:

• If you want to stop yourself from cheating on your diet, establish a no sweets policy at your home.
• If you want to get in shape, put your running shoes in front of your bed.
• If you want to drink more water, put two big full water bottles next to your bed.
• If you want to stop yourself from procrastinating, sell your TV.
• If you want to improve your speaking skills, join a debate team.
• If you want to get rid of your depression, get a dog.
• If you live with somebody who lives a pathological life, move out of the apartment.

Ingredient Four –  Specialisation

Human history is a contest between catastrophe and education”.  – H. G. Wells “Chance can create not only a thief but sometimes a great person”.  – G.C. Lichtenberg “A man who lives everywhere lives nowhere”.  Marcus Valerius Martial

During his time as a student, László Polgár was obsessed with studying the biographies of approximately 400 great intellectuals from Socrates to Einstein.

While reading those biographies, he had identified a common theme — intensive specialisation in a particular subject.

Polgár started to put this discovery into practice, and started to educate his three daughters before they were three years old; when they turned six, he started to ” specialise”  them. 12

Polgár decided to home school his children because he did not believe that our generalised school system could be successful in anything else but to produce mediocrity.

The first characteristic of genius education – I could say the most important novelty distinguishing it from contemporary instruction – and its necessary precondition, is early specialization directed at one concrete field.“ – László Polgár

So, to become a genius in something, the first step is to decide what one wants to be a genius in.

I am sure you have noticed, but this is the exact opposite idea of the generalised school system that we have in most countries of the world.

For that very reason, Polgár made the early decision to home school his children:

It is generally known that you are a pedagogy fanatic; however, you did not put your daughters in school; they did their studies as private students.  Why? The fact that I did not send my daughters to school is, of course, connected to the fact that I hold an unfavourable opinion of it.  I criticize contemporary schools because they do not educate for life, they equalize everyone to a very low level, and in addition, they do not tolerate the talented and those who diverge from the average. Let us take this step by step, and start with your first remark: schools do not educate for life.  Is the old Latin saying “One learns not for the sake of school, but of life” pointless? Contemporary schools are separate from real life in that they function sort of as laboratories.  There is no link with domestic or political or local public life or the everyday cares of living one’s life on the one hand, and school on the other. My daughters, who have never visited a school, grew up much more in the context of real life.  Contemporary schools do not promote a love of learning.  They do not inspire to great achievements; they raise neither autonomous people nor communally-oriented ones. Schools do not manifest or develop potential capabilities in people, at least as much as they could. It seems to me that the second point of your critique of schools is related to this.  That is, they equalize everyone to a very low level.  How would you clarify this? It’s a simple matter.  If all the schools in the country are of only one type, the model is like this: in each school, there are, besides a few outstanding people, many mediocre and weak people.  The mediocre are closer to the weak than to the outstanding.  Of course, a teacher cannot adapt to those few outstanding people, so the teacher presents material that is appropriate for the majority.  Thus, for the outstanding, class time becomes tedious.  Even if the teacher wished to, the teacher cannot “tailor” the study material for most of the students’ individual needs.  So, they cannot make each child work to their potential.  Too often they must make the whole class mechanically repeat more or less identical tasks.  In the current organization structure, they only speak about instruction providing problem-solving skills, but in practice, this is unrealizable.  Thus, both pedagogues and students suffer in school.“ László Polgár 13

And, Polgár was not the only expert who believed that our current school system is not only ineffective but harmful.  Here are a few famous people who failed at school, or in better words; were failed by the school system.

Billionaire and founder of the Virgin brand, Richard Branson, struggled in school with various learning difficulties but has since taken the world by storm.

Branson had enough of school and dropped out of it at the age of 16 in order create a magazine.  Today, he is the owner of more than 400 companies. 14

I think by the age of 16, for most they should have learnt all the basics that they need to get out into the outside world, ideally, they should go off and travel for a year, and if they want to go to university they should be able to go to a university course that is not longer than about two years.” – Sir Richard Branson

Thomas Mann failed three times during his school studies; he later became one of the most famous writers of his generation.

Another one who might surprise you: Albert Einstein.

Einstein was known as a notoriously bad student, and one of his teachers once noted, “He [Einstein] thinks slowly, is agitated, obsessed with stupid dreams”. 15

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education”. Albert Einstein

The great Charles Darwin often got in trouble for being lazy and day-dreaming.

Darwin himself stated, “I was considered by all my masters and my father, a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard of intellect”.

Darwin eventually became a huge figure in the field of Biology.

While I am light years away from the achievements of the gentlemen above, and maybe thank god for that, I know what it feels like to fail at school.

In Germany, when you hit the fourth grade, the teachers evaluate your potential and your capabilities and put you in a “fitting school category“.

There were three categories when I grew up:

• Gymnasium (For talented teens)
• Realschule (For mediocre teens)
• Hauptschule (For idiots)

I still remember how stupid I felt when I got the “Hauptschule Diagnosis“, not because I was labelled as untalented by my school authorities, not because I was separated from my friends or because I had to go home and tell my mom that I did not make it, I felt stupid because up to that point I thought I was a smart kid.

In Germany, graduating from gymnasium is a precondition to studying at any university, so with that diagnosis, my dreams of becoming a psychologist were crushed.

Stuck with incompetent pedagogues who hated their job, and surrounded by other angry and impoverished children, I began to resent school.

The campus became my prison, and I was looking for every possible chance to escape it.

I became an even worse student, and I had to repeat the eighth grade two times before they finally had it with me and kicked me out.

When I was seventeen years old, I had no high school diploma, and I was not allowed to attend any normal school in Germany because it is only allowed to repeat the same class twice.

Just as László conducted an experiment to turn his children into geniuses, my environment succeeded in turning me into a failure of epic proportions.

Academic Failure = Lack of Deliberate Practice, Dysfunctional Environment + Generalised School System + Subpar Educators + No fun + No Orientation Towards the Future + Bad Habits 

After years of blaming the living daylights out of myself, I began to understand that human beings are systematic creatures and that it was not only me who needed repair.

Bad apples usually grow on sick trees…

But what does a good system look like?

What would a day in the genius producing home-schooling system of László Polgár look like?

In his book “Raise A Genius“, he states:

4 hours of specialist study (for us, chess)

1 hour of a foreign language.  Esperanto in the first year, English in the second, and another chosen at will in the third.  At the stage of beginning, that is, intensive language instruction, it is necessary to increase the study hours to 3 – in place of the specialist study – for 3 months.  In summer, study trips to other countries.

1 hour of general study (native language, natural science and social studies)

1 hour of computing

1 hour of moral, psychological, and pedagogical studies (humour lessons as well, with 20 minutes every hour for joke-telling)

1 hour of gymnastics, freely chosen, which can be accomplished individually or outside of school. The division of study hours can, of course, be treated elastically. 16

If you take only one thing away from this article, let it be this: You can only be a world champion at one thing.

To win a game, you first need to decide what kind of game you want to play.

How many people do you know who graduated high school or even college, and have absolutely no idea what they are going to do with their life?

Should it not be the purpose of school to send us equipped with a sharp mind into the world to achieve our dreams?

For most of us, when we leave college, we are not only unprepared but crippled by the debt we had to drown ourselves in to attend university in the first place.

Jack Ma, Founder of the Alibaba group, once told his son:

You don’t need to be in the top three in your class, being in the middle is fine, so long as your grades aren’t too bad.  Only this kind of person has enough free time to learn other skills“.

I can confirm this statement.  When I got kicked out of high school, while at first, I felt like my educational journey was over, I found that I was indeed liberated.

I did not have to take a single course that did not interest me, neither did I have to listen to the teachers who told me I will never amount to anything, and I also did not have to be scared of getting beaten by other kids in my schoolyard.

I was free.

I began to study on my own, and my new teachers were Sigmund Freud, Leo Tolstoy, Viktor Frankl, Friedrich Nietzsche, B.F Skinner, and Carl Rogers, and I never heard a single word of discouragement from them.

Out of that journey of individuation, ensued a form of radical freedom that allowed me to study the only thing that ever interested me: the human condition.

I was specialised by accident.

The good thing about being labelled as a failure is that nobody expects anything out of you anymore, I was finally allowed to become myself.

Five continents and hundreds of devoured books later, I manage to find my way into your life, and I would like to thank you for your precious attention and ask you something:

Are you currently pursuing what is expected, or are you living an authentic and meaningful life? 

When I stumbled over the story of the Polgár’s, I was reassured that my path had turned out to be the correct one, but I was also worried… how many people are doomed for mediocrity because nobody told them that choosing a single field of mastery is not optional but a necessity?

If you have not already chosen a path that will lead you towards the ultimate goal, which is fully actualising your potential, I challenge to do this right now:

If you were to be sent to Polgár’s genius school TODAY, what kind of speciality would you choose to practice for six hours a day? 

In my interview with world-renowned behaviourist Dr Susan Weinschenk, I learned that people align their behaviour with their perception of who they think they are.

This means that your current results are a reflection of your current identity.

The most powerful asset that the three Polgár sisters   were equipped with was a high-quality identity: a Future Chess Champion.

Every identity, whether it is external or self-imposed, comes along with a set of habits, values, and belief systems.

When I was labelled a failure, I subconsciously acted according to that role.

I did not take care of my health because clearly, I was not a valuable thing… I got into fights to experience some sense of power… I developed all sorts of addictions because why bother preserving myself for a future that is going to be depressing anyway?

László Polgár gave his children a high-quality identity right away, and with that, they had a blueprint of what they had to do and who they have to become to reach a future that is worth suffering for.

Here are a few things you can do to align your identity with your goals:

• Investigate the identities of your heroes and adopt their habits, clothing, values, and belief systems (Of course, only emulate virtues that are relevant for your dream).
• Order posters of your heroes and put them on your wall.
• If you want to get better at your career, transform your bedroom into a library with books on your passion topic.
• Do not dress like the person you were yesterday, but like the person, you want to become tomorrow.
• If you want to lose weight, adopt the identity of an athlete.
• If you want to have more intimacy and connection in your life, identify yourself as a “people’s person“.
• If you want to become a better writer, start by calling yourself an author and write every single day.
• If you want to be more respected at your work, identify as a true professional and make it a self-imposed policy never to be late again.
• If you want to become a better basketball player, start by calling yourself a gym rat and truly dedicate yourself to the betterment of your game.
• If you want to become a better student, pride yourself on having a growth mindset and talk to your educators after every class about your flaws.

Your current results are a symptom of the current identities that you adopted, or that were forced upon you.

If you want to change, change the story about yourself first.

A high-quality identity, like the one from the Polgár’s (future chess champion), is a promise from the pedagogue to the student that states: If you follow the code of conduct that I am proposing, things are going to get better for you.

This orientation towards a meaningful future justifies that the pain of being is a basic spiritual need.

Viktor Frankl, the famous therapist and Holocaust survivor, confirms this theory:

 Why are you not ending your life?“

This was a question Frankl often asked his depressed patients right away.

He did so, of course, not because he wanted to promote suicidal thoughts, but because he wanted to find out what exactly it was, that makes life worth living for the patient.

Some patients answered that they had unfinished career goals.

Others said they have someone that they want to be there for.

Frankl would then attempt to reconnect his patients with their life’s purpose so that they could again look into the future and carry their burden properly.

In his time in the concentration camps, the psychiatrist understood that an orientation towards a meaningful future is, indeed, the most powerful motivational force there is. 17

[Speaking of his experience in a concentration camp:] As we said before, any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal…Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.  – Viktor Frankl

Have you ever been witness to a situation where an educator was asked, “Will this be on the test?“

Questions like this are indicators that the student is experiencing a lack of meaning, or in other words, they do not see how this educational investment is going to pay out for them in the future.

In our school system, we blame the student for such questions; we call them lazy and blame them for their disinterest.

In some cases, we even blame the biology of the student.

My good friend, Jeffrey, a young and brilliant creator, was once falsely diagnosed by his teachers with ADHD because he just could not stay attentive during his classes.

In his case, the educators did not only not take responsibility for the fact that Jeffrey and his other classmates could not make it through a single lecture without falling asleep, but they went so far as to blame his anatomy for it.

His class teacher, in collaboration with one doctor, ultimately forced him to take four different drugs just to stay attentive.

In the lecture below, Dr Jordan Peterson gives a variety of reasons why ADHD is over-diagnosed, and why prescribing ADHD medication does more harm than it does good.

In Jeffrey’s case, his symptoms of hyperactivity, inattentiveness, and impulsivity were not symptoms of a brain disorder, but signs that his educators were unsuccessful in stimulating the young man’s talented intellect to the necessary degree.

He was also an extremely athletically gifted guy, who by nature had an awful lot of energy, but as his school physical education was only happening once a week, sitting quietly for nine hours a day was unnatural to him.

And if I am honest, I do not think that this kind of paralysing indoctrination is natural to anybody.

Research has shown, for example, that prescribing physical activity can be just as curative as prescribing pharmaceutical drugs. 18

I furthermore believe that this kind of denunciation of the student is originated by the lack of psychological understanding of emotional mechanics.

I asked myself recently:

Why was I so disinterested in my teachers while the Polgár’s soaked in every bit of information they could get?

The figure above, by Dr Jordan Peterson, is a good visualisation of the fact that human beings are goal orientated creatures.

Think of the Polgár’s, they all bought into the idea that becoming a chess champion was an attractive future destination.

When their father educated them, they knew that every hour of practice would move them closer to the place that they wanted to be.

Let us take a look at my own shortcomings…

When I had geography in the fourth grade, I asked my teacher why I had to study that subject; he told me: because you have to.

Not that geography is not important, but for me, it was not.

I even told my teacher that under no conditions will I ever work in the field, but still, he insisted that I had to study what everybody else studied, for years that is.

To be motivated as a child, one has to be convinced that the time and energy investment is worthwhile and will move one to a better place.

A professor once told me a bad joke that captures this principle…

Why did the chicken cross the road? Obviously, because the other side was better.

If you want to pause for a second and hold your belly from all that laughter, you can do that now.

The combination of daily failure and being imprisoned in a classroom that desperately tried to get me to a place that I did not find meaningful, caused me to avoid education entirely.

We can learn two things from this comparison:

• What is punished is avoided.
• What is rewarded is repeated.

If a student only experiences negative emotions in school, they either become a soulless puppet, or they will rebel against their spiritual tyranny and do everything they can to escape that prison.

The following experiment by John B. Watson, shows perfectly (and unethically) how we can learn to be afraid of neutral stimuli:

Why am I telling you all this?

The purpose of this chapter is to show you the importance of choosing a high-quality identity for yourself.

Only by architecting your ideal future identity can you evaluate your current life’s journey.  If you never invest the time and energy to define your aim, you have absolutely zero chance of hitting it.

But how do you find out what kind of identity you should try to adopt?

Carl Jung believes that the things that put us into flow state are nature’s indicators to guide us toward maximum development. 19

The questions below are derived from my understanding of Jungian psychoanalysis.  They are not direct quotes from him, obviously.

If you are not everything you can be, you will find the questions below helpful:

What makes you lose track of time? ⁠

What do you dislike in others? ⁠

What’s your definition of a “good” person? ⁠

What’s your definition of a “bad” person? ⁠

What did you want to become when you were a child?⁠

If money would not exist, what would you do with your life? ⁠

⁠If you would die next week, what would you regret? ⁠

What are the things in your life in need of repair? ⁠

Which experiences make you feel alive?⁠

Which area of your life do you find the most meaning in?⁠

Ingredient Five –  Love

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius.  Love, love, love that is the soul of genius”. ― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ”The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind”.  — Khalil Gibran “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another”. — The Bible

The last, and in my eyes, the most important ingredient to forge a genius is love.

One thing that even the harshest critics of László Polgár’s radical pedagogical experiment cannot accuse him of is that he and his wife Klara did not care about their children.

László Polgár and his wife Klara literally had to fight for the education and realisation of their children.  In one instance, Soviet authorities stormed the house of the Polgár’s with a machine pistol because the Polgár’s refused to send their children to the public school system.

If that kind of commitment does not secure you the dad of the year award, I do not know what would. 20

The Polgár’s believed that love was indeed a precondition to outstanding achievement, in his book Raise a Genius, he states:

Genius = Labour + Luck Happiness = Labour + Luck + Love + Freedom “Let us not fear to raise our children with optimism and courage (without begrudging the material expense!).  Prodigies are not miracles, but natural phenomena; indeed, they must be formed as natural phenomena.  Parents and society are responsible for the development of the children’s capabilities.  A large number of geniuses are lost because they themselves never learn what they are capable of“.

Creating a genius is not a one-man job.  It is a collective effort to realise an individual fully.

Before the Polgár’s started their experiment, they examined the childhoods of histories many  most eminent people, and they noticed that behind every genius was a network of dedicated and caring educators:

We examined the childhoods of many eminent people and noticed that all who became geniuses specialized very early in some field, and we could also document that beside them always stood a father or mother, a tutor or trainer, who were “obsessed” – in the good sense of the word. So, on the basis of our research, we could rightly conclude that geniuses are not born one has to raise them.  And if it was possible to raise an outstanding person, we definitely needed to try this.  So, we did, and our attempt brought success.

The idea that behind every outstanding person stands one or many outstanding educators is hard to deny.

Let me give you a couple of case studies to prove this theory:

Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922)

Bell reinvented the field of communications by creating the first telephone, but years earlier, he struggled in school.  Even though he was gifted at problem-solving, it is thought that he had trouble reading and writing, possibly as a result of dyslexia.  He was eventually home-schooled by his mother.  With her help, Bell learned to manage his challenges, and he went on to change the world. 21

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)

According to many accounts, the world-famous artist may have had dyslexia.

Don’t think I didn’t try [to learn at school]”, he said.  “I tried hard.  I would start but immediately be lost”.  – Pablo Picasso

Fortunately, his father, an art teacher, encouraged him to develop his artistic talents.  His unique vision of the world came through in his powerful works of art.  The rest is history. 23

Felix Mendelsohn (1809-1847)

The master musician would, in his short life span, came to be recognised as one of the most prominent composers of his time.

Felix’s mother, Leah Mendelsohn, a trained musician and artist, took care of his early musical education.

She made a continuous effort to developing Felix’s talent, and she regularly shipped in the world’s most eminent teachers to teach him.

Felix was, for example, from 1816 and 1817, tutored by Marie Bigot (a gifted and stimulating teacher who had been admired by both Haydn and Beethoven for her technique). 24

According to Radcliffe (2000), only on Sunday mornings was Felix allowed to wake up later than 5:00 am. 25

Thomas Edison(1847-1931)

Edison is today known as one of America’s greatest inventors and businessmen but was not always admired as a genius.

When Edison was in elementary school, he returned home one day with a letter from one of his teachers.

He said to her, ”Mom, my teacher gave this paper to me, only you are allowed to read it.  What does it say?”.

Nancy Edison’s eyes teared up as she read the letter to herself.

“Your son is addled [mentally retarded].  We will not allow him to attend our institution any longer”,

After gathering herself, she faced Thomas and pretended to read the letter to him:

Your son is a genius.  This school is too small for him and doesn’t have enough good teachers to train him.  Please teach him yourself”.

Edison’s mother did not give up on her son and designed an excellent home-schooling routine for her Thomas, and Edison left his school behind without a second thought.

By the time his mother died, Thomas had become arguably the greatest inventor of the century.  After her passing, Edison sifted through old family records and found an old brownish letter deeply hidden in his mother’s closet.

It was the letter from his elementary school that Edison’s mother received many years before.

Edison sobbed for hours, before writing with conviction in his diary:

Thomas Alva Edison was an addled child, that, thanks to the heroism of his mother, became the genius of the century.” 26

Moral Of This Story

You might ask yourself now: Well, I was not specialised in my early childhood, and a transcending educator did not groom me, so it is too late for me, isn’t it?

Not only is the answer to that question a clear no, but I would also argue that you have an advantage over all the eminent people that I wrote about in this long article.

I only need one word to tell you why: Technology .

The internet has caused a revolution that successfully democratised information.

If you were to travel back in time and tell somebody that future generations succeeded in developing a device that would you give you instant access to all pieces of knowledge ever collected, they would probably burn you at stake.

Technology, in that sense, is indistinguishable from magic.

While it is definitely advantageous to have parents who open doors for you, it is entirely possible to create your own success system around you.

In ancient times, only the most elite were given a chance to be tutored by experts.  Today, you are just one email away from sending a mentee pitch to one of your idols.

Self-actualised people are communal treasures who not only achieve happiness by living an authentic and fulfilled life; they make things better for everybody around them.

I firmly believe that the fact that a person like me, labelled as an academic failure, now speaks to thousands of people through his blog about the power of learning is an indicator that the notion that everything is possible is indeed true.

I wrote this article to show you that there is clearly more to you than meets the eye and that there is a level out there where all your dreams and potential are realised.

It is indeed true, however, that geniuses are rare things, not because there is a lack of talent, but because we, as a society, only raise them occasionally.

Luckily for me, I had two stubborn parents who preserved my love for books and people, and who never stopped their unconditional belief in me.

I have learned over the years that education has the power to transform every wall into a door.

Therefore, I would like to pass on this family tradition and tell you something from the bottom of my heart:

I believe in your potential.

If you discipline yourself, align your environment with your goals, adopt a favourable identity, and surround yourself with people who want the best for the best part of you, you are going to be the champion you were always meant to be.

Thank you for reading,

• Flora, C (July 1, 2005) The Grandmaster Experiment [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200507/the-grandmaster-experiment
•   Myers, Linnet (February 18, 1993). “Trained To Be A Genius, Girl, 16, Wallops Chess Champ Spassky For $110,000” . Chicago Tribune.
• Howard, B. (2014, June 19) Explaining male predominance in chess [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://en.chessbase.com/post/explaining-male-predominance-in-chess
•   Lundstrom, Harold (Dec 25, 1992).  “FATHER OF 3 PRODIGIES SAYS CHESS GENIUS CAN BE TAUGHT” .  Deseret News .
• Robinson, Andrew.  “Can We Define Genius?” .  Psychology Today . Sussex Publishers, LLC . Retrieved  25 February 2020 .
• Hughes, Virginia. (April 21, 2014) “The Tragic Story of How Einsteins Brain got stolen”. [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2014/04/21/the-tragic-story-of-how-einsteins-brain-was-stolen-and-wasnt-even-special/
•   Elo, Arpad E (2008). “8.4 Logistic Probability as a Rating Basis”.  The Rating of Chessplayers, Past&Present . Bronx NY 10453: ISHI Press International.  ISBN   978-0-923891-27-5 . a Hungarian-American physics professor.

Kalb, C. (2018, May 1,). Exploring Characteristics of Prodigies. National geographic . Retrieved from  https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/05/genius-child-prodigy-science-art-autism/

•   Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1961): Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63 , 575–582.
• Ericsson, K. A., Prietula, M. J., Cokely, E. T. (2007, July): The Making of an Expert. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2007/07/the-making-of-an-expert
• Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R., Th., Tesch-Romer, C., (1993): Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review 1993, Vol. 100. No. 3, 363-406
• Dsouza, M. (201 9 ): “The Astonishing Success Story of the Genius Polgar Sisters“[Blog post]. Productiveclub .  Retrieved from https://productiveclub.com/polgar-sisters-story/
• Anne N. Thorndike et al., “A 2-Phase Labeling and Choice Architecture Intervention to Improve Healthy Food and Beverage Choices,” American Journal of Public Health 102, no. 3 (2012), doi:10.2105/ajph.2011.300391.
• Akass, E.(2019, Oktober) ”Richard Branson urges kids to leave school at 16” [Blog post]. Employee. Retrieved from https://engageemployee.com/richard-branson-urges-kids-to-leave-school-at-16/
• Vagin, M. (2019, April) ”Albert Einsteins Struggle with School”. Enlightium Academy . Retrieved from https://www.enlightiumacademy.com/blog/parent-center/entry/albert-einstein-s-struggle-with-school-1
• Polgár, L. (1989). Bring Up Genius! Budapest, H. v1.1 2017-07-31

Viktor Frankl:   Maria Marshall; Edward Marshall (2012).  Logotherapy Revisited: Review of the Tenets of Viktor E. Frankl’s Logotherapy . Ottawa: Ottawa Institute of Logotherapy.  ISBN   978-1-4781-9377-7 .  OCLC   1100192135 . Retrieved  16 February  2020 .

• Reddy, S.(2014, September 8):” Exercise Helps Children With ADHD in Study”. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/exercise-helps-children-with-adhd-in-study-1410216881
• C. G. Jung:  Gesammelte Werke.  7, § 266, 404.
• “Nurtured to Be Geniuses, Hungary’s Polgar Sisters Put Winning Moves on Chess Masters” .  People.com . May 4, 1987.
•  “The Bell Family”. Bell Homestead National Historic Site. Retrieved September 27, 2013.
•  “Picasso”. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language(5th ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2014. Retrieved 3 June 2019.
• Larry R. Todd, “Mendelssohn, Felix.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 30, 2013, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/51795
• Radcliffe, (2000). The Master Musicians: Mendelssohn. New York: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://mendelssohnincidentalmusic.weebly.com/early-development–education.html
• Cep, C. (2019, October 21): “The Real Nature of Thomas Edison’s Genius”. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/28/the-real-nature-of-thomas-edisons-genius

Susan Polgár

Susan Polgar  (born April 19, 1969, as  Polgár Zsuzsanna  and often known as  Zsuzsa Polgár ) is a Hungarian and American chess player. Polgár was Women’s World Champion from 1996 to 1999.

On the FIDE rating list of July 1984, at the age of 15, she became the top-ranked female player in the world. In 1991 she became the third woman to be awarded the title of Grandmaster by FIDE. She won twelve medals at the Women’s Chess Olympiad (5 gold, 4 silver, and 3 bronze).

Also a trainer, writer, and promoter, Polgar sponsors various chess tournaments for young players and is the head of the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence (SPICE) at Webster University. She served as the Chairperson (or co-chair) of the FIDE Commission for Women’s Chess from 2008 until late 2018.

László Polgár

László Polgár  (born 11 May 1946 in Gyöngyös), is a Hungarian chess teacher and educational psychologist. He is the father of the famous Polgár sisters: Zsuzsa, Zsófia, and Judit, whom he raised to be chess prodigies, with Judit and Zsuzsa becoming the best and second best female chess players in the world, respectively. Judit is widely considered to be the greatest female chess player ever as she is the only woman to have been ranked in the top 10 worldwide, while Susan became the Women’s World Chess Champion.

He has written well-known chess books such as  Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games  and  Reform Chess , a survey of chess variants. He is also considered a pioneer theorist in child-rearing, who believes “geniuses are made, not born”. Polgár’s experiment with his daughters has been called “one of the most amazing experiments…in the history of human education.” He has been “portrayed by his detractors as a Dr. Frankenstein” and viewed by his admirers as “a Houdini”, noted Peter Maas in the  Washington Post  in 1992.

Sofia Polgár

Sofia Polgar (Hungarian:  Polgár Zsófia ,  pronounced  [ˈpolɡaːr ˈʒoːfiɒ] ); born November 2, 1974) is a Hungarian, Israeli and Canadian chess player, teacher, and artist. She is a former chess prodigy.She holds the FIDE titles of International Master and Woman Grandmaster and is the middle sister of Grandmasters Susan and Judit Polgár. She lives in Israel and has worked as a chess teacher and artist.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk

Susan Weinschenk has a Ph.D. in Psychology, and is the Chief Behavioral Scientist and CEO at The Team W, Inc, as well as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. Susan consults with Fortune 100 companies, start-ups, governments and non-profits, and is the author of several books, including 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People, 100 MORE Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People and How To Get People To Do Stuff. Susan is co-host of the HumanTech podcast, and writes her own blog and a column for Psychology Today online. She has been interviewed for, and her work cited in media publications including The Guardian, Huffington Post, Brain Pickings, and Inc. Dr. Weinschenk’s area of expertise is brain and behavioral science applied to the design of products, services, experiences, and human interactions. Her clients include Disney, Zappos, the European Union, Discover Financial, and United Health Care. Dr. Weinschenk was a consultant on the Emmy nominated TV show Mind Field, and is a keynote speaker at conferences, including, South by Southwest (Austin Texas), Habit Summit (San Francisco), From Business to Buttons (Stockholm), and USI (Paris).

Dr. Anne Thorndike

Anne Thorndike, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Physician at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, MA. She is the Director of the Metabolic Syndrome Clinic at the MGH Cardiovascular Disease Prevention Center. Her clinical and research interests are the prevention and treatment of obesity and cardiometabolic disease through lifestyle modification.  Her research focuses on interventions utilizing behavioral economics strategies, such as traffic-light labels and choice architecture, to improve dietary intake and health outcomes in worksite and community-based settings. She has received research funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, as well as several other foundations and government organizations.  She currently serves on the Nutrition Committee of the American Heart Association, and is a member of the expert panel for the U.S. News and World Report Best Diets Rankings.

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was a German mathematician and physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize for physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. In the following decade, he immigrated to the U.S. after being targeted by the German Nazi Party.

His work also had a major impact on the development of atomic energy. In his later years, Einstein focused on unified field theory. With his passion for inquiry, Einstein is generally considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century.

Judit Polgár

Judit Polgár (born 23 July 1976) is a Hungarian chess grandmaster. She is generally considered the strongest female chess player of all time.Since September 2015, she has been inactive. In 1991, Polgár achieved the title of Grandmaster at the age of 15 years and 4 months, at the time the youngest to have done so, breaking the record previously held by former World Champion Bobby Fischer. She was the youngest ever player to break into the FIDE Top 100 players rating list, ranking No. 55 in the January 1989 rating list, at the age of 12. She is the only woman to qualify for a World Championship tournament, having done so in 2005. She is the first, and to date only, woman to have surpassed 2700 Elo, reaching a career peak rating of 2735 and peak world ranking of No. 8, both achieved in 2005. She was the No. 1 rated woman in the world from January 1989 until the March 2015 rating list, when she was overtaken by Chinese player Hou Yifan; she was the No. 1 again in the August 2015 women’s rating list, in her last appearance in the FIDE World Rankings.

She has won or shared first in the chess tournaments of Hastings 1993, Madrid 1994, León 1996, U.S. Open 1998, Hoogeveen 1999, Sigeman & Co 2000, Japfa 2000, and the Najdorf Memorial 2000.

Polgár is the only woman to have won a game against a reigning world number one player, and has defeated eleven current or former world champions in either rapid or classical chess: Magnus Carlsen, Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik, Boris Spassky, Vasily Smyslov, Veselin Topalov, Viswanathan Anand, Ruslan Ponomariov, Alexander Khalifman, and Rustam Kasimdzhanov.

On 13 August 2014, she announced her retirement from competitive chess. In June 2015, Polgár was elected as the new captain and head coach of the Hungarian national men’s team. [8]  On 20 August 2015, she received Hungary’s highest decoration, the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Stephen of Hungary.

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Tabish Nadeem

October 7, 2022 at 5:40 pm

Beautiful article.. Thanks a ton

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The Grandmaster Experiment

How did one family produce three of the most successful female chess champions ever.

By Carlin Flora published July 1, 2005 - last reviewed on June 9, 2016

The world's first female grandmaster was ready to deliver her regular Thursday-night lecture. Susan Polgar was perfumed, coiffed, made-up and dressed in a sleek black pantsuit, an elegant contrast to the boys and young men hunched over their boards in her Queens, New York, chess club. "I have a special treat," Susan, 36, announced in her gentle Hungarian accent. "Tonight, everyone will get to play me." Blitz chess it was—each opponent received five minutes on his clock to Susan's one. She first sat across from a young Serbian man. The two began slamming pieces and punching down their side of the clock, creating a percussive sound track to their lightning-fast moves. Susan beat him with a good 30 seconds to spare. He shook his head and avoided her eyes. A retired bartender and a 14-year-old boy succumbed almost as quickly. A reluctant 9-year-old suffering from an allergy attack was then coaxed to step up to the challenge. "Don't worry about your eyes—everybody loses to her anyway," his mom said helpfully. The boy's minutes slipped away to inevitable loss. "Once you have a winning position," Susan said, "play with your hands, not your head. Trust your intuition ."

When Susan was the age of many of her students, she dominated the New York Open chess competition . At 16 she crushed several adult opponents and landed on the front page of The New York Times. The tournament was abuzz not just with the spectacle of one pretty young powerhouse: Susan's raven-haired sister Sophia, 11, swept most of the games in her section, too. But the pudgy baby of the family, 9-year-old Judit, drew the most gawkers of all. To onlookers' delight, Judit took on five players simultaneously and beat them. She played blindfolded.

In 1991, when Susan was 21, she became the first woman ever to earn the designation Grandmaster, the World Chess Federation's title for top-ranked players. Judit picked up the honor the same year, at age 15. She was a few months younger than Bobby Fischer was when he won the title.

Judit, who is now the top-ranked woman and eighth overall player in the world, would go on to win a match in 2002 against reigning champion Garry Kasparov, who has said that "women by nature are not exceptional chess players." But the Polgar sisters may be the exceptions that prove Kasparov's point: Only 11 out of the world's about 950 grandmasters, including Susan and Judit, are female. The sisters' saga may cast light on the knotty question of why so few women are elite performers in math and the hard sciences. But in the Polgars' case, a unique upbringing and the idiosyncrasies of chess itself further complicate the picture.

Judit, Susan and Sophia grew up in a veritable chess cocoon spun by their father, Laszlo, the intellectual equivalent of Serena and Venus Williams' autocratic tennis dad, Richard. Some people consider Laszlo's role in shaping his daughters' careers to be absolute; others call it a happy coincidence. Raw talent and a childhood with all the advantages account for success in many fields, and chess is no exception. But the paths Susan, Judit and Sophia took as adults illuminate many intangibles in the achievement equation. An aggressive streak, birth order , a chance encounter that leads to a marriage on the other side of the world—these factors and changes of fortune are just as critical in determining whether a person rises to the top of his or her game.

Forty years ago, Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian psychologist, conducted an epistolary courtship with a Ukrainian foreign language teacher named Klara. His letters to her weren't filled with reflections on her cherubic beauty or vows of eternal love. Instead, they detailed a pedagogical experiment he was bent on carrying out with his future progeny. After studying the biographies of hundreds of great intellectuals, he had identified a common theme—early and intensive specialization in a particular subject. Laszlo thought the public school system could be relied upon to produce mediocre minds. In contrast, he believed he could turn any healthy child into a prodigy. He had already published a book on the subject, Bring Up Genius! , and he needed a wife willing to jump on board.

Laszlo's grandiose plan impressed Klara, and the two were soon married. In 1973, when she was barely 4 years old, Susan, their rather hyperactive firstborn, found a chess set while rummaging through a cabinet. Klara, who didn't know a single rule of the ancient game, was delighted to find Susan quietly absorbed in the strange figurines and promised that Laszlo would teach her the game that evening.

Chess, the Polgars decided, was the perfect activity for their protogenius: It was an art, a science, and like competitive athletics, yielded objective results that could be measured over time. Never mind that less than 1 percent of top chess players were women. If innate talent was irrelevant to Laszlo's theory, so, then, was a child's gender . "My father is a visionary," Susan says. "He always thinks big, and he thinks people can do a lot more than they actually do."

Six months later, Susan toddled into Budapest's smoke-filled chess club. Aged men sat in pairs, sliding bishops, slapping down pawns and yelling out bets on their matches. "I don't know who was more surprised, me or them," she recalls. One of the regulars laughed when he was asked to give the little girl a game. Susan soon extended her tiny hand across the board for a sportsmanlike victory shake. It was an ego-crushing gesture. Soon thereafter, she dominated the city's girls-under-age-11 tournament with a perfect score.

In 1974 Susan was in the middle of a chess lesson when Laszlo received the call that Klara had given birth to another daughter, Sophia. Just 21 months later, Judit was born. As soon as they were old enough to feel the pain of parental exclusion, the younger girls peeked through a small window into the room where their father taught Susan chess for hours each day. Laszlo seized upon their curiosity. They could come in and watch, he told them, but only if they also learned the game. With that, Laszlo gained two additional subjects.

Laszlo battled Hungarian authorities for permission to homeschool his children, and he and Klara then taught them German, English and high-level math. (All three are multilingual; Susan speaks seven languages, including Esperanto, fluently.) They swam occasionally and played Ping-Pong, and a 20-minute breather just for joke telling was penciled in each day. But their world was largely mapped onto the 64 squares of the chessboard. "My dad believed in optimizing early childhood instead of wasting time playing outside or watching TV," Susan says.

Laszlo believed that the girls' achievement in chess would bring them not only success. More importantly, it would make them happy. Klara took care of the pragmatic aspects of her family's intense home-life, and in later years, coordinated their travels to tournaments in 40 countries. "They complemented each other perfectly," says Susan. Laszlo initiated the great plans, but, as Klara said, "I am always part of the realization. The thread follows the needle. I am the thread."

The brain has three tasks to carry out when contemplating a chessboard. It must comprehend the rules, as each piece moves according to its own powers and restraints. Then it must analyze potential moves, which involves envisioning different configurations on the board. Lastly, it must decide which move is most advantageous. Here the game requires critical thinking in the visual-spatial realm. Visual-spatial processing is the single biggest ability gap between men and women—the glimmer of truth behind the stereotype of men-as-road-trip- aces who deftly follow maps and fit the luggage into the car. The visual-spatial processing center is located in the right side of the brain; among elite chess players (Kasparov included), there is a much higher proportion of left-handers, who have dominant right brains, than chance would predict.

Testosterone accelerates development of the right brain and may slow development of the left side. But the effects aren't binary: Regardless of its sex , each brain falls on a continuum between "male" and "female" extremes in an array of traits. Furthermore, the neural pathways that allow for chess's cognitive pyrotechnics develop in response to environmental influences and are most malleable in young children. Estrogen , in fact, enables neural plasticity —women tend to recover better from strokes than men, for example—and the hormone primes women for neural growth and change, points out neuropsychiatrist Mona Lisa Schulz, author of The New Feminine Brain. By teaching his daughters chess at a young age, Laszlo essentially molded their brains, enriching their visual-spatial centers and closing any gap that gender may have broached.

Gender differences do emerge, however, in the way kids look at chess. "Girls can learn how to play just as well as boys," Susan says. "But they often approach the game differently. Girls would rather solve chess puzzles than play against one of their friends," she says. Boys will always choose to compete.

These orientations can long influence a player's style, says Paul Truong, captain of the U.S. Women's Olympiad chess team and coauthor of Susan's forthcoming book, Breaking Through: How the Polgar Sisters Changed the Game of Chess . "When I play Susan," he says, "I look for the quickest, most brute force way to win—even if it's a very typical checkmate. She looks for a more elegant, unusual way." As a teacher, Susan indulges girls' preference for conflict-free mental challenges and supports sex-segregated events for beginners. There are so few girls in attendance at national coed tournaments, she says, that their self-consciousness often squashes their enthusiasm for the game.

Susan's feminine touch is apparent at her club, where tea and cakes are served to the mostly male members. "It's rare to have someone of Susan's stature interacting with amateurs like us. You wouldn't see Kasparov sitting here, talking to a normal person," notes Ruth Arluck, a retired teacher. Truong agrees. "Susan even insisted on wooden instead of plastic chess pieces. It takes a woman to notice these things," he says.

Anders Ericsson is only vaguely familiar with the Polgars, but he has spent over 20 years building evidence in support of Laszlo's theory of genius. Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, argues that "extended deliberate practice" is the true, if banal, key to success. "Nothing shows that innate factors are a necessary prerequisite for expert-level mastery in most fields," he says. (The only exception he's found is the correlation between height and athletic achievement in sports, most clearly for basketball and volleyball.) His interviews with 78 German pianists and violinists revealed that by age 20, the best had spent an estimated 10,000 hours practicing, on average 5,000 hours more than a less accomplished group. Unless you're dealing with a cosmic anomaly like Mozart, he argues, an enormous amount of hard work is what makes a prodigy's performance look so effortless.

Critics dismiss Ericsson's doctrine as the "drudge theory" of genius. It is reasonable to assume, they say, that the musicians who logged more hours did so because they had more innate ability and therefore obtained better results from their practice sessions. But Ericsson protests that talent's effects level off. Deliberate practice is not mechanically repeating tasks that come easily, but rather targeting and attacking specific areas that need improvement.

"My father believes that innate talent is nothing, that [success] is 99 percent hard work," Susan says. "I agree with him."

The Polgars' high-rise apartment in downtown Budapest was a shrine to unremitting chess practice. Thousands of chess books were stuffed onto shelves. Trophies and boards cluttered the living room. A file card system took up an entire wall. It included records of previous games for endless analytical pleasure and even an index of potential competitors' tournament histories. Framed prints depicting 19th-century chess scenes served as decor in the main room, where the girls often sat cross-legged on the floor, playing blindfolded blitz games that lasted mere minutes.

Such a regimen tempts accusations of light torture had the children been unwilling pawns. But blindfolded speed chess was the sisters' idea of fun. And while they had a few friends in the neighborhood, the girls were perfectly content to pass their days training with elderly male grandmasters. "I had an inner drive," recalls Susan. "I think that is the difference between the very good and the best."

Ellen Winner, a psychologist at Boston College, calls this drive the " rage to master." She thinks it's what propels prodigies through grueling years of training. "The rage to master is a prodigy's primary motivation ," she says. "Mastering a certain activity is more important to them than socializing, than anything else." Winner believes that infusing a child with the rage to master is impossible: "You can force your kids to work harder, but you can't get them to have that level of passion. The sisters could have just as easily rebelled against Laszlo."

In fact, they couldn't be stopped. Laszlo once found Sophia in the bathroom in the middle of the night, a chessboard balanced across her knees. "Sophia, leave the pieces alone!" he said, shaking his head. "Daddy, they won't leave me alone!" she replied.

What are the chances, though, that three girls destined for stellar achievement would be born to a man convinced that geniuses are made?

"The Polgar sisters are a beautiful coincidence," says Ognjen Amidzic. A neuroscientist in Switzerland, Amidzic once aspired to become a professional chess player. He had the "rage to master" and even moved to Russia as a teenager to study intensively with grandmasters. But he reached a plateau at age 23 and had to quit. Reeling from his wrecked dreams , Amidzic went into cognitive science to understand what went wrong. Through the use of brain scans, he discovered a marked difference between grandmasters and highly trained amateur chess players like himself: When grandmasters play chess, the areas responsible for long-term memory and higher-level processing are activated.

Chess titans have anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 configurations of pieces, or patterns, committed to memory. They are able to quickly pull relevant information from this mammoth database. With a mere glance, a grandmaster can then figure out how the configuration in front of him is likely to play itself out.

Amateurs, by contrast, use short-term memory while playing chess. When they take in new information, it stays in the "small hard drive" of working memory without passing over into the "zip drive" of long-term memory. "Amateurs are overwriting things they've already learned," says Amidzic. "Can you imagine how frustrating that is!"

Amidzic's research suggests that chess whizzes are born with the tendency to process chess more through their frontal and parietal cortices, the areas thought to be responsible for long-term memory. Players whose medial temporal lobes are activated more will be consigned to mediocrity. He hasn't yet been able to follow children over time to see if their processing ratio of frontal-and-parietal cortices to medial temporal lobes indeed remains stable, but his retrospective analyses of older players show that their ratio corresponds to their highest historical chess rating, as would be expected if the ratio truly predicts chess performance. And he doesn't think that gender influences this proclivity. He had scanned the brain of a 22-year-old female chess beginner and found her ratio to be far above average. If she sets her mind to it, Amidzic believes, the young woman has the potential to become a master-level player.

Amidzic's own chess-processing ratio, on the other hand, is about 50-50. "I'm the Salieri of the chess world," he says. "I'm talented enough to admire and also to know what I will not achieve. It's better to be ordinary and not know."

Susan, Sophia and Judit were all extraordinary at a game that was essentially thrust upon them. "It's like an arranged marriage that worked out well," says Josh Waitzkin, eight-time national chess champion and subject of the book and film Searching for Bobby Fischer. But eventually, each sister grew into herself.

"The beauty of chess is that your personality can come across on the board," says Waitzkin. "Sophia was lighthearted, very funny and coquettish. As a teenager she was stunningly beautiful. Men adored her left and right, and she enjoyed that. She was a brilliant speed player, sharp as a tack. But she didn't work as hard as the others."

"Sophia is the artist of the family," Susan concedes. "She liked playing chess, but the analytic part was a burden for her. Chess is artistic when the pieces combine in a beautiful, original way. This is what held her back: She was striving too much to find beauty in the game. She didn't develop the other side—defending—which means accumulating small advantages." Sophia had a glorious moment in a 1989 Italian tournament when she finished ahead of five grandmasters in a record-breaking performance that became known as the "Sac of Rome." But she also had a reputation for making careless blunders. Other interests pulled at her attention.

"It's not that chess was too much for me; it was too little," Sophia says. She quit competing shortly before marrying an Israeli grandmaster (and orthopedic surgeon) in 1999. She studied painting and interior design and is now a full-time mom to sons Alon and Yoav. She was the sixth-best woman player in the world at the height of her career —an astounding exit point for the supposed "weak link" of the family. "I may go back to playing professionally," she says. "It's just, at this stage in my life, it's not the right time. I don't have any regrets. There's a lot I can thank chess for. I met my husband through chess."

Everyone agrees that Sophia was the most talented of the three, the one most likely to possess Amidzic's ideal processing ratio. "Everything came easiest to her," says Susan. "But she was lazy." People don't always derive the most enjoyment from the things they're best at. Adults tag children who show promise and watch their progress with vested interest, causing some kids to falter under the weight of great expectations. "The most gifted kids in chess fall apart," says Waitzkin. "They are told that they are winners, and when they inevitably run into a wall, they get stuck and think they must be losers."

Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford University, has found that people's beliefs about their abilities greatly influence their performance. When she praised children's intelligence after they succeeded at a nonverbal IQ test, they subsequently didn't want to take on a new challenge—they preferred to keep looking smart. When they were forced to complete a more difficult exercise, their performance plummeted. In contrast, some children were praised for "how" they did a task—for undergoing the process successfully. Most of the children in this group wanted to take on a tougher assignment afterward. Their performance improved for the most part, and when it didn't, they still enjoyed the experience.

Laszlo's staunch belief that talent is irrelevant may have protected his daughters from losing motivation when they failed. Defeat is inevitable as one moves up the chess ladder—as soon as a player achieves a higher rating, he or she is paired with stronger opponents. By keeping his daughters focused on the learning process, says Dweck, Laszlo also kept them from worrying about a precious gift they would have to sit and polish.

"The motivation for succeeding in chess was just there in the atmosphere of our house," says Sophia. "Susan was such a strong player that Judit and I wanted to be like her. But I could give up easier than Judit. I never worked as hard as she did."

Judit launches aggressive attacks as often as she creates elaborate defenses and "artistic" combinations. She may freely use emoticons in e-mail correspondence, but on the chessboard she is nothing short of macho. She is known for her laserlike focus and unladylike desire to crush her opponents. Kasparov once described chess as "the most violent of all sports." The only goal is to prove your superiority over the other guy, he said, and "women are weaker fighters." When Judit was 15, Pal Benko, a former Hungarian chess champion who coached the Polgar sisters, said of the tall teen with flowing red hair: "She is dangerous. She does not play chess like a woman."

"Judit was a slow starter, but very hardworking," says Susan. She was also born into a chess factory that had worked out its production kinks. She is, without a doubt, the best woman chess player the world has ever seen and at the age of 29 still has a shot at winning the world championship. Like Kasparov, Judit considers chess a sport more than an art or a science and dedicates every spare moment to training. Just as no player can capture the other side's king without sacrificing some important pieces, she is willing to give things up for chess glory. "If I felt a sacrifice was too much, though, I would stop," Judit says. "I feel happy with my life the way it is." She lives in Hungary with her husband, a veterinarian, and gave birth to her first child, a son, Oliver, in August 2004.

Judit's face adorns billboards selling cellular phone service in Budapest, where she is a household name. "I believe that I am as tough as other women who are very successful and have had to prove their abilities over and over again," Judit says. "My colleagues have finally accepted me, but years ago they did treat me differently. Susan once said she never won against a healthy man. What she meant was that men always had some excuse after losing a game to a woman: "It must have been my headache."

There exist some downsides to being a female chess player that Kasparov may not be aware of. "There were many times when I felt faint at matches because of menstrual cramps," Susan says. "When I was about 16, I did faint. I fell off the chair." A room filled with older male adversaries is a horrible place for a girl to experience Judy Blume-esque moments. Tournament games are often six hours long, and extra time for trips to the ladies' room is not allotted. In a game where every point is precious, even one minute of discomfort could jeopardize a woman's score, Susan insists. (Mother Nature may have equipped female chess players with a compensatory measure, however: The extra estrogen surging through a woman's body during menstruation aids concentration .)

Of course, women in chess face more public challenges as well. In 1986, at age 17, Susan was the first woman ever to qualify for the Men's World Championship. The world chess federation, FIDE, would not let her go. She was devastated. (The federation eventually changed its policy and renamed the tournament the World Championship.)

The Polgar sisters also had strained relations with the Hungarian chess federation, which wouldn't let them travel abroad for fear of defection. Laszlo ruffled bureaucratic feathers by encouraging his daughters to skip many of the all-women tournaments so they could spar with better-trained male players. But in 1988, when the girls were 19, 14 and 12, the federation allowed the family to go to Greece to compete in the Women's Olympiad. Playing together as a team, Susan, Sophia and Judit brought home the first win against the Soviets in history for Hungary, or as some joked, for "Polgaria." The Independent described the scene after the big victory: "The three girls of various sizes, a plump mother and Laszlo, gnomelike, with a cloth cap covering his balding head, they looked like the happy scene at the end of a fairy story."

"It was one of those few things that permanently changes your life," Susan says. "Until then, we had a lot of doubters and bad-wishers. After that, we became national heroes." Sponsorships poured in. "We could have a summer house and a car. It was almost like winning the lottery." Except, of course, that the Polgars had earned it.

"I wanted to be champion of the world," Susan says. "That won't ever happen now, but I was able to pave the way for Judit, and I'm very proud of that." (The gender divide in chess is such that even as the second-best woman in the world, Susan ranks in the hundreds overall.)

In 1994 Susan married an American computer programmer and left her cushy existence in Hungary to join him in Queens. "It was a downgrade for me," she says, with a hint of disappointment.

"I would not have to work if I were in Hungary. Here, I am not at all set financially." When she was pregnant with her first son, Tommy, FIDE would not allow her to postpone defense of her title. She later sued the organization and won a settlement.

Susan stopped playing professionally for three years after the birth of sons Tommy in 1999 and Leeam in 2000. She considered the average three-week tournament too long to be away from her boys. "Children are a part of life," says Susan. "Because of that, there will always be fewer women playing chess than men. In many professions, it's OK to be good, or very good; there is no need to be the best. But only the very best can make a living at chess. While it's tough for any new mother to go back to work, it's much tougher when you're trying to be world-class."

In 2002 her marriage fell apart, and she now faces the logistical and emotional challenges of single motherhood. She plays chess just a few hours a week with her sons, and is not nearly as methodical with them as Laszlo was with her. "It's hard without the support of both parents—my mother was there taking care of things. I can't always raise my sons the way I'd like... It's a sad situation."

Susan did, however, realize a lifelong wish when she opened up her chess club in 1997. She is now chess's ambassador at large, promoting the game in schools, especially for girls. "Chess teaches children concentration, logic and creativity . It also teaches them to be responsible for their actions," Susan says. "There are no take-backs—just as in life. You must think before you move."

As Laszlo steered his daughters' careers, he kept one simple fact in mind: Most female chess players do not set their sights high enough. In order to achieve parity with their male counterparts, they, too, need a vision of world domination. Susan now wants to raise chess's stature in the United States to that of golf or tennis, and in 2004 led the U.S. women's team to win a silver medal in the Olympiad in Spain. A live television broadcast of the Anna Kournikova and Tiger Woods of the chess circuit facing off as Budweiser banners wave in the background is hard to envision. But 32 years ago, when Laszlo first taught Susan chess, it was just as difficult to imagine a woman posing a legitimate threat to any male chess champion.

This summer, for the first time in 10 years, the sisters will appear together in an exhibition in Las Vegas. Susan, Sophia and Judit will take on 100 opponents simultaneously. In relay style, Susan will make the first move on each board, Sophia will follow with the second, Judit will make the third and so on.

Laszlo harbored one final, grandiose hope that never came to pass. "About 15 years ago," says Susan, "we had a sponsor, a very nice Dutch billionaire named Joop van Oosterom. He was fascinated with the idea of whether genius is the result of nature or nurture. He wanted to enable my parents to adopt three boys from a developing country and raise them exactly as they raised us. My father really wanted to do it, but my mother talked him out of it. She understood that life is not only about chess, and that all the rest would fall on her lap."

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Genius Child Development: “Raise a Genius!” by László Polgár (Book Summary)

By Kyle Kowalski · Leave a Comment

This is a book summary of Raise a Genius! by László Polgár ( Free Online ).

Premium members also have access to the companion post: 🔒 How to pursue Genius Education with “Raise a Genius!” by László Polgár (+ Infographic)

Quick Housekeeping:

• All content in “quotation marks” is from the author (otherwise it’s paraphrased).
• All content is organized into my own themes (not the author’s chapters).
• Emphasis has been added in  bold  for readability/skimmability.

Book Summary Contents:

About the Book & László Polgár

Socialization & society, contemporary school & potential genius, 20 characteristics of genius education, theses, principles, traits, & values, developmental ages & daily life, chess & happiness.

Genius Child Development: Raise a Genius! by László Polgár (Book Summary)

“I do not present a prescription, merely a point of view. I do not wish to exhort anyone to raise a genius. I wish to demonstrate that it is possible … I can only say that I have created something that up to now no one else has created .”

About the book:

“This book of mine appeared in Hungarian in 1989. In it I described and summarized my psychological and pedagogical experiments regarding my daughters’ and my 15-year educational experience .”

• “ I do not give a prescription, only a way of life , and I wish to persuade no one to raise geniuses. I merely wish to show that it is possible to raise geniuses .”
• “I can only pass on my pedagogical system, and guide everyone along the road that I followed, confident that it is possible and worthwhile to raise geniuses, for they can and indeed have become happy people .”
• “ The object of a pedagogical experiment can be nothing other than a person , and for their good one not only has the right, but even the duty of performing pedagogical experiments. In fact, all parents, even if not consciously, ‘experiment’ with their children. An intentional, humanistically organized experiment is much more likely to succeed .”
• “The essence of my pedagogical program is that in my opinion, every healthy child can be raised to be an outstanding person, in my words, a genius . When we began this work with my wife, we read through a large collection of books and studies. We examined the childhoods of many eminent people and noticed that all who became geniuses specialized very early in some field, and we could also document that beside them always stood a father or mother, a tutor or trainer, who were ‘obsessed’ – in the good sense of the word. So on the basis of our research we could rightly conclude that geniuses are not born: one has to raise them .”
• “The uniqueness of my experiment lies in that it is – one could say – a family group experiment, made possible by the birth of my three daughters . I have built my pedagogical optimism on this result.”

László Polgár on himself:

“I have a beautiful family, a happy marriage, three beautiful, healthy, happy, intelligent children, and I feel as well that in my work I can enjoy the pleasure of creation, for I have done something that will last. I believe that I am happy .”

• “As concerns my view of life: I have worked 15 hours a day since I was 14 . For me, quality is the main thing. I wish to do everything always at the highest level . Mediocrity, the orientation to the middle, I refuse out of principle. I strive for the summit despite obstacles .”
• “ (I’m) a person who shapes his environment, his destiny, his society, and himself . If I think through my life in my mind, I can deduce my character, my me-ness, from it. If I consider my personality traits, I can predict my destiny, because they are interrelated. Of course certain ethnic distinctives can be found in me, like over-strenuous working, over-emotionality, yearning for accomplishments, the central role of the family, the desire to develop the capabilities of my daughters, and from time to time possibly also a bit of aggression and noise.”
• “I think of myself as an honest, sincere, plain-spoken person, very sensitive about justice. I have a great love of freedom and thirst for knowledge . I am very happy that to my knowledge I have deceived no one. Regarding my work I have established very high requirements, although I also understand those people who live otherwise. Other people possibly consider me an extremist, but I prefer to call myself an optimistic realist .”
• “ I have raised my daughters to be true women . I have not only not hindered their feminization, among other things, but on the contrary: I very much expect that their psychosexual development is also normal and healthy .”
• “ I could not live otherwise than what I profess . Striving for harmony between words and actions, needing to put ideas into practice, is an integral part of my moral concept and practice.”

“In the end I would like to prove that socialization, development within society, and in that context the genius-izing of a person, depends firstly not on their native biological powers: their way of life is not decided from birth; it must be considered principally as a social product, in practice, a result of nurture . To express it provocatively, I often say, ‘Genius is not born, genius is raised .'”

Socialization:

“A healthy human has such an elastic cerebral system and flexible developmental structure that their efficacy can be developed to a high degree by pedagogical methods. The way is open for pedagogy, since children are developable, and from the viewpoint of the intellect they can be formed in any manner … Mental traits are unambiguously socially determined .”

• “ At birth every person is equal . After birth a person takes on so-called ethnic-psychological characteristics, adapting to cultural traditions and educational demands .”
• “Specific capabilities are not people’s endowments from birth, but one must make them manifest through education .”
• “One thing is certain: education also needs much more educated parents . One should devote more time to the children.”
• “ Parents and society are responsible for the development of the children’s capabilities . A large number of geniuses are lost because they themselves never learn what they are capable of.”
• “It is indeed decisive what kinds of influences reach a child in their family, what kind of example they see, in which direction they are raised – not only in what subject, but in what world view. I consider it a completely natural matter that parents will hand down their own world view: for indeed they can give nothing else .”

Society & social responsibility:

“In my conception, education is good for the individual and desirable and useful for society. A genius is a collective creation who becomes a communal treasure .”

• “A person is not born morally ready, does not bring moral values along from the womb, a maximum capability to become a moral being. But how they become, a loving family member or a hateful one, an altruist or an egoist, a humanist or a fascist – is not genetically fixed, but depends primarily on education and surroundings. As with all abilities, the moral ones can be and must be learned .”
• “Without moral values one lacks a compass for life … One should hand down in childhood fundamental moral values, which are generally human , so one does not need to restrict them, in the traditional sense, to any particular world view or political party.”
• “In my opinion genius is a notion about preserving values. I only consider those who realize socially useful actions to be geniuses … The more educated and the more talented someone is, the greater is their social responsibility .”
• “ Raising geniuses is one of the preconditions for social progress , and any society can be guided out of economic difficulty for the most part only by education and instruction.”
• “Naturally, society needs to be guided by geniuses. Geniuses should become accustomed to the idea that they should serve and, if necessary, direct.”

Guiding Questions:

“ Is this a nice feeling for a child? Yes, it is nice. Is it useful for the child? Yes, it is useful. Is it useful for society? It is useful.”

“When my wife and I investigated the outcomes and ways of life of extraordinary people, we decided that to fulfil our educational duty we would not choose the traditional form, but we would teach our children privately .”

Contemporary school:

“The fact that I did not send my daughters to school is of course connected to the fact that I hold an unfavorable opinion of it. I criticize contemporary schools because they do not educate for life, they equalize everyone to a very low level, and in addition they do not tolerate the talented and those who diverge from the average .”

• “In contemporary schools students do not understand why they are learning .”
• “ Contemporary schools are separate from real life in that they function sort of as laboratories. There is no link with domestic or political or local public life , or the everyday cares of living one’s life on the one hand, and school on the other. My daughters, who have never visited a school, grew up much more in the context of real life. Contemporary schools do not promote a love of learning . They do not inspire to great achievements ; they raise neither autonomous people nor communally-oriented ones . Schools do not manifest or develop potential capabilities in people , at least as much as they could.”
• “Contemporary schools are disadvantageous for unusually capable children … They hinder the development of talented children in that school instruction is tedious for them .”
• “It is not easy to make average people inclined to accept geniuses . Even in school talented children are often excluded from their classmates . Teachers do not succeed in making the class like the talented student. Many times even the teacher does not recognize the talent, and even hinders its development.”
• “School groups are also very unstable ; peripheral children are susceptible to the influence of mass opinion .”

Potential genius:

“ I see a potential genius in each individual born healthy … Every healthy person has the capacity from birth for it, and genius is a normal result of the development of this potential.”

• “Every healthy child is born with enough general endowment that from them can come a high level personality .”
• “Every child born healthy is potentially a genius, and if one pays enough attention, they will in fact become one … whether they become so or not depends on circumstances, on education, and on themself .”
• “I am convinced that if child prodigies do not become ‘adult prodigies,’ conditions were not favorable for healthy and structured work . In good conditions every child prodigy becomes an adult prodigy.”
• “ Intellectual capability is in principle educable in any direction ; by appropriate methods a genius can be formed in any field .”
• “ The journey from potential genius to actual genius is a battle for liberation, a process of freeing the genius . Future society will very likely be composed of evolved, self-realized, free individuals, and genius will be considered a normal, everyday existence, and not as an individual ‘extravagance.'”

The essence is always the same:

“Both at home and at school one must teach each part carefully, and everything always solidly . Half efforts make no sense, since the next stages will lack a foundation on which to construct the material to be assimilated. In addition it seems to me that one of the deficits of Hungarian teaching is that one does not construct knowledge upon other knowledge . I consider it a further error that – mainly because of the lack of intensive instruction – after three weeks the child forgets what they learned earlier … If the instruction is good, one has no need of giving grades .”

Featured in the Premium companion post: 🔒 How to pursue Genius Education with “Raise a Genius!” by László Polgár (+ Infographic)

These are the guiding strategies behind genius education.

5 theses…

Thesis 1: The role of natural and societal, from birth or acquired, hereditary and ‘educational’ factors. The personality of the person is a complex union of three factors:

• An endowment of nature: Biological endowments from birth. In the first months of life, biological effects dominate.
• An effect of the environment: Things received by acquisition throughout life (the crucial link is the effect of environment, of society; from the viewpoint of the development and freedom of the personality, the deciding link is seen through the passage of time to be one’s existence in a society). For the first ten years, society is undoubtedly increasingly emphasized.
• A creation of the individual: Responses fought out and ‘sweated’ out from oneself. Later, the activity of one’s own personality strengthens.

Thesis 2: The interpretation of existence in a society. In this I call out two aspects:

• The immediate surroundings of a person (family, friends, etc): mediates imitative ‘heredity.’
• Their more distant circumstances: mediates socio-cultural ‘heredity.’ Thus, aside from biological heredity, it is also the effect of the family model and the historical-cultural heredity of the larger society that determines the nature of a person. A member of society shares in human nature. The individual lives out their own development under the effects of societal forces like self-realization. From this it follows that education must consider a child also as a co-author.

Thesis 3: The way to develop creativity. Every healthy person is born with sufficient biological endowments to be able to specialize these general endowments in some concrete form of action:

• As opposed to many other pedagogues and parents, I see the task of education not in exploring or finding in the child ‘innate’ or hidden capabilities. If we assume the existence of a general endowment in each child, I start from this: that we must develop in them some special capability.

Thesis 4: One can and must consciously organize the development of geniuses, and it is not sufficient to leave them to chance:

• Self-evidently, education in itself is not all-powerful, for it depends also on concrete social conditions. But the fact that its effect is enormous empirically proves my results. Pedagogical effects stand under the influence of the social environment: and such is the social need, the demand, that creates the general practice of education.

Thesis 5: Pedagogical humanism, according to which the essence of the formation of personality is the striving for as perfect self-realization and as complete happiness as possible:

• Every person should strive to attain the greatest result attainable by them, and realize oneself – this can bring about one’s own happiness and also that of others. The pedagogue’s task is also to aim for – as it is possible – not the average, but the peak. Considering outstanding achievements positively, one should fix human happiness as the ultimate goal for oneself. Therefore it is possible and necessary to raise geniuses, because, among other things, this guarantees the most certain road to happiness.

Principles:

Among my pedagogical principles some that occupy an important place are: awakening and holding the interest of the child, requiring accomplishments from the child, trust in them, and praise and admiration for their accomplishments .

• Be an example: live such that others follow you!
• Learn and work hard, be demanding on yourself and others!
• Be willing to love, give and receive love!
• Live with yourself and others in peace, live a healthy and moderate life!
• Strive for happiness and endeavor to make other people happy!
• Have humanistic ideas and fight against prejudice!
• Preserve peace and tranquility in the family, raise your children as perfectly as possible!
• Be honest, respect your and others’ freedom!
• Trust the development of people, nurture small and large communities!
• And finally, the wild card, that is, everything that you think moral and current, but which is not in the other nine points.

Among the goals of education I and my wife consider of first importance the formation of the following traits :

• Belief, courage, strength, persistence, enthusiasm, the objective evaluation of persons and objects, standing up to failure and also the temptations of success, insistent striving for goals, patience, inventiveness, tolerance of criticism even if false, being able to let go of stresses, enduring conflicts (a higher level of tolerance for frustration), discipline, planning, the need for challenging work, establishing realistic goals, conscious management of rest, freedom from conventions, searching for new paths, keeping oneself in an appropriate state of humor (good humor, calm and aggressive at the same time).

In addition we also aim for these kinds of values, world views and moral standards :

• The love of siblings, parents and teachers, respect for elders and the aged, realistic evaluation of peers and adults, and that children not prefer the pleasure of physical life, the symbols of the social status of creative work, etc.

“Successful education is not possible without a great deal of work. Education only bears fruit after 10-20 years . But if we begin it only ten years from now, we will have results after only 20-30 years.”

Developmental ages & stages:

“ The most difficult problems in education would be for the most part solved, if one could begin instruction soon enough … If we want to satisfy the demands of the future, we must begin with children at the earliest possible age.”

• Preschool (Ages 3-6): Early childhood, the period between 3 and 6 years (the preschool years) occupies a central place—more important and principally much more in need of utilization than thought of in the current specialist literature. Early childhood is entirely not early from the viewpoint of learning, even as it concerns specialization. Firstly, foreign languages. This does not hinder the child in the development of thinking; it does not spoil the parental language; on the contrary, it even enriches the personality. In multilingual regions, children of very young ages can already speak multiple languages with full fluency and without mixing them.
• Ages 3-4: Parents should choose a specific field at their discretion. It is only important that by the age of 3-4 some physical or mental field should be chosen, and the child can set out on their voyage.
• Ages 4-5: By my didactic principle, one should begin instruction, which is in my concept nothing other than a serious game, at the age of 4-5 (a disadvantageous environment causes in the first 4-5 years more damage than later impoverished development during the next 10-12 years).
• Ages 5-6: I sent my daughters to a Russian-language kindergarten, and at the age of 5 all of them fluently spoke Russian as well as Hungarian. At the age of 5-6, if the activity is sufficiently interesting, success can also function as a strong incentive. Stimulation, encouragement, and instilling passion and trust are very important. The ability to learn by play decreases after 6 years of age, when assimilation of information becomes more difficult mental work.
• Age 10: In practice an intensive collaborative contact between the child and an adult must be formed, in which the child does not feel ‘subordinate.’ Think how advantageous it would be if the child already understands at the age of 10 that they know a great deal, that they are a person of the same value as an adult, and that in their life there is at least one field they master as well or better than adults.

Stage (vs age) peers:

“One should not neglect the nature of the developmental stage in evaluating creativity! … Make everything appropriate to the stage ! With regard to the content of instructional materials and also the duration of instruction, one should start from the traits of the age of the child, and tailor the tasks for the optimum ability of the child … It is not primarily important for a child to have suitable companions of the same age, but preferably to have spiritually (mentally) appropriate partners, friends worthy of the level of their intellectual capabilities. If the social relationships of a child are exclusively or for the most part limited to groups of the same age, this will slow the progress of an exceptionally capable child.”

Typical daily schedule:

“It is not by chance that every prominent chess player also practices some physical sport as a supplementary activity. My daughters play table tennis or swim 1.5 to 3 hours a day .”

• 4 hours of specialist study: Starting from age 4-5 they played chess 5-6 hours a day.
• 1 hour of a foreign language: Esperanto in the first year, English in the second, and another chosen at will in the third. At the stage of beginning, that is, intensive language instruction, it is necessary to increase the study hours to 3 – in place of the specialist study – for 3 months. In summer, study trips to other countries.
• 1 hour of general study: Native language, natural science and social studies.
• 1 hour of computing
• 1 hour of moral, psychological, and pedagogical studies: Humor lessons as well, with 20 minutes every hour for joke telling.
• 1 hour of gymnastics: Freely chosen, which can be accomplished individually outside school. The division of study hours can of course be treated elastically.

We can describe happiness with the following formula: happiness = work + love + freedom + luck . · Under profession: work, accomplishments, creativity. · Under love: feelings given to others and reciprocated. · Under freedom: the potential and capability of a person to become an independent, autonomous, and creative individual. · Under luck: the union of random external (recognition, peace, family environment, etc.) and internal (health, strength, physiological endowments, spiritual and material goods, etc.) factors.

Sport & Chess:

“When we began the practical foundation of our genius-educating theory, at first we planned to experiment with mathematics, chess and foreign languages. Influenced by several factors, we decided in the end in favor of chess … In the end, we decided that chess in itself is a complex, very valuable, and beautiful activity: a game, a science, an art, a sport, and a psychology simultaneously .”

• “ Sport is one of the best educational methods that parents have, because they hardly have to make an effort; in almost every child there is a desire to move, to actively compete . At the same time the practice of sports makes one used to observing certain rules, and contributes to right conduct, a regulated way of life, and discipline. Plus it is very useful if the members of the family play sports together, if they do anything together. If the family plays sports, they pass more time together, and this is incomparably beneficial.”
• “ Chess develops characteristics like those of athletes: willpower , competitiveness, the drive to win, a strong physical state, a competitive routine, etc.”
• “ Psychologically founded competition can seriously help in the development of personality traits : it forms the will and emotions, increases persistence, self-discipline, competitiveness, etc.”
• “ By means of chess I also want to form the personalities of my daughters . I always say to them that it is more important that they are people – virtuous, honest people. From this it follows that my daughters always play fairly.”
• “ Chess is also useful because it satisfies some societal need of the person ; it is a spiritual entertainment, a sport, a game, an art. Chess satisfies these needs – with scientific demands.”

“ The first and essential condition for becoming happy is for one to want happiness . Many people want to make their children happy, want to see them thus, but they do not do enough, or even very little. They let themselves be guided by accidents of education. I, on the contrary, have the principle that one should approach and perform education very intentionally for happiness .”

• “ Happiness is a complex phenomenon (a process and a state), which also contains components of genius. It consists of several elements: enjoyment of work, honesty, health, wisdom, material conditions, cheerfulness, love, optimism, courage, tranquility, lack of worry, fulfilment of duties, the satisfaction of spiritual and material needs, a sense of joy, satisfaction, perspective, a correct view of life, a full experience of love, rest after work done well, creativity, success, establishing goals, high-level needs, and I could continue for a long time…”
• “ The future of our children is on my heart, and my chief aspiration is to make them happy. But is not enough to merely desire the happiness of our children; we must create and develop in them the capability to be happy. Many ways lead to happiness, although not all with the same certainty, but among them the most certain and guaranteed is – in my opinion – that of genius education.”
• “Genius education – according to my definition – aims for the development of personality, happy people, and the development of socially and morally progressive individuals. Therefore I say: genius education, education for happiness, and humanism are unified things; one does not develop one without the others .”
• “ The all-encompassing goal is undoubtedly happiness, and in relation to this genius education can be considered a method, but also it is about a dialectical process: in real life one grows through the other, that is, they prepare and strengthen each other reciprocally. Achievements lead to feelings of happiness, and happiness gives new motivational strength for higher achievements. Thus the method is formed from the goal and the goal from the method.”
• “ Which one considers the greatest result depends on the viewpoint. I would choose the happiness of our family. ‘Harmony and love reigning’ in our home, although important, is not the only factor in our happiness. I can declare one thing with definite certainty: without a good family background and loving family relationships my daughters’ successes would never have happened.”

A final thought from the mother, Klara Polgar:

“ I believe that my daughters live at least as happily as any of their peers. But I might claim that they live even more happily. In my opinion they are balanced and have very rich internal lives. Many doubt that they had and have real childhoods. I feel that they have not only real childhoods, but also those that prepare them for all of life and are foundational for their happiness. A person is truly happy when they do what they are willingly occupied with. They have found themselves, and are also respected for it. They have been doing from infancy things that are close to them, about which they are self-confident, and doing which they feel good about themselves … I always wanted to live a beautiful, peaceful family life, and to make my children good, honest people, who achieved at a high level.”

You May Also Enjoy:

• See all  book summaries  &  book recommendations / reading list
• “The Inner Game of Tennis” by W. Timothy Gallwey (Book Summary)
• “The Art of Learning” by Josh Waitzkin (Book Summary)
• “Ultralearning” by Scott Young (Book Summary + Infographic)
• “Range” by David Epstein (Book Summary)
• “A Synthesizing Mind” by Howard Gardner (Book Summary)
• “Livewired” by David Eagleman (Book Summary)

About Kyle Kowalski

👋 Hi, I'm Kyle―the human behind Sloww . I'm an ex-marketing executive turned self-education entrepreneur after an existential crisis in 2015. In one sentence: my purpose is synthesizing lifelong learning that catalyzes deeper development . But, I’m not a professor, philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, scientist, mystic, or guru. I’m an interconnector across all those humans and many more—an "independent, inquiring, interdisciplinary integrator" (in other words, it's just me over here, asking questions, crossing disciplines, and making connections). To keep it simple, you can just call me a "synthesizer." Sloww shares the art of living with students of life . Read my story.

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Book Review: Raise A Genius!

A few months ago, I learned about Laszlo Polgar, the man who trained all three of his daughters to be chess grandmasters. He claimed he could make any child a genius just by teaching them using his special methods. I was pretty upset because, although he had a book called Raise A Genius , it was hard to find and only available in Hungarian and Esperanto.

Many SSC readers contributed money to get the book translated, and Esperanto translator Gordon Tishler stepped up to do the job. Thanks to everyone involved. You can find his full translation here: Raise A Genius!

I was hoping that this book would explain Lazslo Polgar’s secrets for raising gifted children. It does so only in very broad strokes. Nor does he seem to be holding much back. But it looks more like he doesn’t really have secrets, per se. The main things he does differently from everyone else are the things he’s talked about in every interview and documentary: he starts young (around the time the child is three), focuses near-obsessively on a single subject, and never stops. Polgar:

The first characteristic of genius education – I could say the most important novelty distinguishing it from contemporary instruction – and its necessary precondition, is early specialization directed at one concrete field. It is indeed true what Homer said, “A person cannot be experienced or first in everything.” Because of this parents should choose a specific field at their discretion. It is only important that by the age of 3-4 some physical or mental field should be chosen, and the child can set out on their voyage.

He has a couple more things to say, but they’re more like vague principles than like specific details. The rest of the book is his opinions on the meaning of genius, his gripes about the Hungarian government, the ways public schooling destroys children’s natural creativity, and various related subjects.

And maybe this stuff deserves some attention. He spends a long time responding to people who say it’s inhumane or immoral to educate children the way he does it, and certainly those claims need a response. A lot of his pedagogical philosophy and personal philosophy of life come out in the way he answers these questions, and given how few specifics he gives, maybe understanding his broader worldview is the way to go. And although a lot of people talk about how public school destroys children’s minds, it’s always good to hear it from the mouth of somebody who’s put his money where his mouth is and done a better job.

But what can we glean from this book in terms of how one can educate a child in the Polgar method?

The closest Raise A Genius comes to anything like a specific prescription is Polgar’s description of what a day might be like in some kind of imaginary Polgar genius school:

In genius education it is necessary that the pedagogue (whether the parents or professional teachers or tutors) stay in direct, constant and intensive contact with the child. Because of this we imagine groups of only 10-15 members. In practice an intensive collaborative contact between the child and an adult must be formed, in which the child does not feel “subordinate.” Think how advantageous it would be if the child already understands at the age of 10 that they know a great deal, that they are a person of the same value as an adult, and that in their life there is at least one field they master as well or better than adults.

As for the curriculum, it would be:

– 4 hours of specialist study (for us, chess) – 1 hour of a foreign language. Esperanto in the first year, English in the second, and another chosen at will in the third. At the stage of beginning, that is, intensive language instruction, it is necessary to increase the study hours to 3 – in place of the specialist study – for 3 months. In summer, study trips to other countries. – 1 hour of general study (native language, natural science and social studies) – 1 hour of computing – 1 hour of moral, psychological, and pedagogical studies (humor lessons as well, with 20 minutes every hour for joke telling) – 1 hour of gymnastics, freely chosen, which can be accomplished individually outside school. The division of study hours can of course be treated elastically.

All of this cries out for more explanation (in particular, the humor lessons sound fascinating), but the only part he really explains is the foreign language. He quotes Frantishek Marek: “Learning foreign languages in early childhood is very important, because without that a person cannot later express themself spontaneously, rapidly, and appropriately”, and I think suggests (though I might be misunderstanding) that languages are one of the easiest things to teach young children, and so a good way to get them into the spirit of learning things. He also thinks languages are nice because they have a defined end-goal (speaking fluently) and obvious progress along the way, so children feel good about learning them. He argues Esperanto is perfect for this: as a logical constructed language, it’s very easy to learn, and it convinces children that learning is fast and easy. Then with their Esperanto knowledge they’ll be much better able to pick up other languages later on. I’m not really sure what to think of this – language learning might be more important if you grow up speaking Hungarian rather than English, and Polgar seems so enthusiastic an Esperantist that it’s hard to picture him recommending it for purely rational reasons – but he’s quite insistent on it.

This idea that children should learn things they find exciting and enjoyable – and where they keep making measurable progress – recurs throughout the book. Often it’s in the context of a kind of counterintuitive point, where someone asks him “Won’t kids hate having to learn so much?” and Polgar answers that kids may hate public school, where they sit around a lot and never feel like they’re really mastering anything, but won’t hate intensive genius education, where they actually feel like people are trying to make them good at things:

In conditions of intensive instruction a child will soon feel knowledgeable, perceive independence, achieve success, and shortly become capable of independently applying their knowledge. Let us take an example from language learning. Let us suppose that someone visits a class for interpreters at a school for geniuses, where they are occupied for 5-6 hours with a first foreign language, Esperanto if possible. (Why precisely with this language I will clarify below.) After some months they are already corresponding with children in other countries, they participate in meetings in and outside of their country – and longer-lasting – where they experience serious successes, and they converse fluently in the language they have learned by then. Is this a nice feeling for a child? Yes, it is nice. Is it useful for the child? Yes, it is useful. Is it useful for society? It is useful. In the following year one can do the same with another foreign language – let us say English – and in the year after that another. The same is valid for any field of life. In this way a child really enjoys what they are doing, and they see that it makes sense. In contemporary schools students do not understand why they are learning. But in genius-education schools the children know that after a few months they will speak Esperanto, in the following year English, in the following year German, etc. Or in the field of chess; in the first year they play at level 3, after the third year at level 1, after five years as a master candidate, after 6-7 years as a master, after 8-10 years as an international master, and after the 15th year as a grandmaster. So the child sees the goal and meaning of their work.

One thing is certain: one can never achieve serious pedagogical results, especially at a high level, through coercion. One can teach chess only by means of love and the love of the game. If I may advise: one should make sure that before everything the father or mother should not diminish the child’s habit of chess playing by too much severity. We should make sure not to always win against the child; we should let them win sometimes so that they feel that they also are capable of thinking. In this way we should bring them to a feeling of success.

So how does one go about ensuring that a child loves education?

At the start it is most important to awake interest. We should make the child aware that who learns this knows this. And chess is learnable. If we educate the child such that they can be a partner, can accept, create, and initiate, then we can always entrust them with more independent tasks. We should get the child to love what they do – to such a degree that they do it almost obsessively. The Hungarian psychologist Tamas Vekerdy warns of the same thing, that infants more easily master things that awake and draw their interest, their attention. And even at the beginning, the child should feel joy. We should not be angry, if they jump around here and there during a chess game; indeed, it is a known fact in psychology that even though a child might frolic aimlessly because of their age-appropriate character, their thoughts can still stay on the task. We should not tell them everything; we should try to get the child themself to say something! We should not ourselves make all the moves; we should try to get the child themself to make the moves! This is the so-called Socratic method, and the essence of instruction in problem-solving – projected onto chess. Of course great success is not achievable without motivation. At the age of 5-6, if the activity is sufficiently interesting, success can also function as a strong incentive. Stimulation, encouragement, and instilling passion and trust are very important. If the parents and tutors tell the child that they are foolish and bad, the child will probably truly believe this. But the opposite also applies: if we say that they are clever and skillful, they will believe that as well. They often truly believe that, and try harder to actually become so. I consider it a basic principle that success is extraordinarily important. When I began the experiment, I thought that although I would not let my daughters avoid failure, they would nevertheless need to grow up accompanied by success. The proportion of failure to success should be 1 to 10.

The experience of success or failure, as Adler demonstrates, greatly influences the self-confidence – or uncertainty – of the child. According to P. Michel as well, the experience of success, the admiration of others, and the recognition of teachers, significantly stimulates further action, increases the trust of the child in their knowledge and ability to a high degree. According to Frank, failure, suffering, and fearfulness decrease achievement. Following a number of successive failures, even a damaging inhibitory complex can be created. With an increase in stress, action becomes more superficial and behavior less calm. Similarly, in the opinion of M. Juck, success experienced in one area increases (and failure decreases) the level of aspiration in other areas. Helm’s experiments prove that experience of success decreases the time necessary for solving later tasks, and increases the elasticity and ideational richness of the mind, while following failure there can be hindrances, rigidity, and relative ideational poverty in thinking, and problem-solving time increases.

One should have great patience. We should let the child arrive at a sense of success, but we should not handicap ourselves (we should not give up major pieces or an advantage in pawns), because in that case the structure of the game changes. Preferably the parents or teachers should provide a temporal handicap, or weave intentional mistakes into the game, so that the child can use them for themself. During the game the tutor should organize their position on the board intentionally as is appropriate for the student and the development of the child at their age.

To awaken the child’s interest. The child should like what they are occupied with, that is, be interested in it. One must little by little accustom them to the work and create in them the unification of work and play. It is important as well that the child become accustomed to learning and working. Particular training is necessary for the workload. I call well-organized and age-appropriate work active rest. A child’s workload should be such that they experience it as active rest. Students, for example, who must attend lectures which they then enjoy, feel more rested afterwards than before. And if the speaker lectures inexpertly, they almost fall asleep from boredom and fatigue after half an hour.

There’s a lot of this, always exhorting people to make sure children enjoy being intensively educated, but always giving only vague gestures on how to do it. I suspect Polgar was a naturally gifted teacher, and his daughters naturally curious students, and that he never really encountered problems in this regard and doesn’t expect other people to either. Some of this seems apparent in his section on play:

I think of play as a very important phenomenon, perhaps more important than do many of those psychologists who put it on a pedestal. But play is not the opposite of work. Play is very important for a child, but in play there is an element of work. One should not separate these two factors in a child’s value system; if for example a child hears at an impressionable age, “Play, son, don’t work!” this can later result in him feeling that work is alien. On the contrary, it is my opinion that a child does not like only play: for them it is also enjoyable to acquire information and solve problems. A child’s work can also be enjoyable; so can learning, if it is sufficiently motivating, and if it means a constant supply of problems to solve that are appropriate for the level of the child’s needs. A child does not need play separate from work, but meaningful action. Children already enjoy doing meaningful things in infancy. They like solving problems during play, even pleasurable play. The more meaningful and information-rich the problems they solve during their activities, the greater is their enjoyment and sense of success. In the end it is most important at this age to awaken enjoyment and good feelings in them. Regarding my daughters, it is my experience that learning presents them with more enjoyment than a sterile game. I have the feeling that play deprived of information often plays only a surrogate role, of surrogate action, of surrogate satisfaction. This is proven also by the fact that when we examine the biographies of exceptionally capable children, we find that they played much less than their peers. The profound and lengthy research of L. M. Turman in California in 1920 uncovered many differences between the play of unusually capable children and their peers. As expected, play that demanded mental action was much more interesting to the talented children. They played alone somewhat more often, compared to the control group. Susanna Millar writes in her book Psychology of Play that sometimes unusually capable children who lack peers at the same intellectual level can have difficulties in play with others. Thus I generally do not rigidly separate learning from play, or work from hobbies at an adult level. From my point of view, workloads could be measurably increased by appropriate methods. I agree with the pedagogical tendency to ask for intensive instruction. The essence of intensive instruction lies really in using goal-directed workloads, age-appropriateness, the holding of interest, and the lived experience of achievement and success. The American G Doman thinks the same. In his analogy: as the different muscles of the body can be developed and strengthened only by regular training, so also the capabilities of the brain can only grow by means of daily training. The lack of structured logical thought and learning causes a decrease in intelligence, just as un-exercised body parts atrophy. Doman knows, on the basis of three decades of practical experience, that the brain grows most rapidly between the ages of 1 and 6, and it almost “effortlessly” assimilates knowledge. The ability to learn by play decreases after 6 years of age, when assimilation of information becomes more difficult mental work.

More on peers:

The contemporary psychological and pedagogical literature emphasizes in one sense the importance of the peer group. But in my pedagogical concept it receives a slightly different emphasis. According to me, it is not primarily important for a child to have suitable companions of the same age, but preferably to have spiritually (mentally) appropriate partners, friends worthy of the level of their intellectual capabilities. If the social relationships of a child are exclusively or for the most part limited to groups of the same age, this will slow the progress of an exceptionally capable child.

[Some say that children should not spend too long with adults, but this] is disadvantageous only if the intellectual level is too different, and if the relationship between child and adult is not suitable, for example, if the adult imposes everything on the child so they take away their independence and initiative. But if they try to correctly develop these traits in the child, it is not damaging, but on the contrary is useful. About this I do not want to say that a child should always be in the company of adults. One must find the right proportion of being with adults and peers. I believe that passing their time in the company of those who have a similar level of intellect and similar interests and sense this well in these interactions is decisive. Zsuzsa is a concrete example: if at the age of 13 she had played chess only with 13-year-olds, who were weaker than her in many categories, this would have been less than useful for her. And for her opponents it would not have been nice to be “knocked out” in every match. Zsuzsa herself would not have profited, because she needed playing partners at a similar level, and those were found only among adults. However, this was not a cause for concern, as the age difference itself did not prevent friendly relationships with others, and having good friends and colleagues at the same time. And friendship often flowed from work relationships. Thus one’s work is at the same time a hobby.

On curriculum design:

Of course, one should make everything appropriate to the stage! With regard to the content of instructional materials and also the duration of instruction, one should start from the traits of the age of the child, and tailor the tasks for the optimum ability of the child. At first we should only play chess for half an hour; after some time a bit more. After a week we can extend the duration. At first we should solve only simple problems, and with the passing of time we should always progress to more complicated ones. One should get the child to play a great deal, but always with suitable partners, who have a generally similar playing ability. On some occasions they can be weaker, on some stronger, so that the child experiences what winning and losing are like. But one must certainly find the right proportion. In childhood they should play rapidly, so they should play many blitz matches and those with a short time limit. […] In this case age-appropriateness is also very important. First one should learn the movements of the king. We practiced this for several days, and later we play “king against king.” The task is this: one king must reach the opponent’s baseline, that is, one must go to the other side of the board. Whoever does this first wins. If some king can stand next the other, then the game ends without a decision. When we had learned this well, we added the next piece, the pawn. In this game the goal was the same: to get to the other side. After several days we added the rook, then the knight. After 3-4 weeks we arrived at the queen. Understanding the queen’s mate followed later. Possessing this knowledge, we played great pawn battles during the following weeks. That is, only the pawns and the two kings were on the board. After a pawn changed to a queen we played until mate. The children really liked this. During this we started learning the knight’s moves. This is most difficult for children, but not truly a problem, although one must carefully practice this. Later we became acquainted with the simplest mating moves. First I collected around 1,000 one-move mate diagrams; later I found two-, three-, and four-move mate diagrams and posed them as problems. Only after this did we begin playing real chess. The time we spent getting there lasted about 3-4 months. We should not begrudge the time for this! In this way we assimilate (very deeply and solidly) not only rudimentary knowledge, but the children become accustomed to the carefully considered and foundational game, work. Possessing solid knowledge, they simply and easily learned the later tasks. The possessed resolution, and self-confidence, and arrived at success. They experienced the knowledge and enjoyment of its use.

On grades and competition:

If the instruction is good, one has no need of giving grades. In addition, this truly makes no sense in chess. I would rather arrange various in- and inter-class contests. It is worth sending children to foreign competitions only if we feel that they will do well there. Competition only makes sense when it is evident that it will develop those who are capable of it, and can inspire greater accomplishments on the basis of the results. We should never drive students to failure.

And on the end goal:

An important function of genius education is instilling the capability for self-education. It starts with establishing in the child independent interests. Little by little we can instill in them self-education, independence, and creative work. The pedagogical co-worker cannot always stay at their side. So one of the most important educational tasks is to teach self-education. The latter contributes to, among other things, the child liking what they do, and in their life work is not separate from hobbies.

And unrelated to child-rearing, but very related to a previous discussion on this blog:

The fact is that today a newborn baby, being Jewish, has a much greater chance, by the statistics of Nobel prizes , at this prize, than if they are born in a non-Jewish family. This seems to many to be genetically determined. I have a completely different opinion. I conclude that social “heredity” and the response to one’s own Jewishness causes this phenomenon. I accept – this is indeed a fact – what Endre Czeizel also mentioned on Hungarian Radio (1989-05-23), that the proportion of Jews among Nobel prize-winners is 30%…, and if one is born Jewish, they have a hundred times greater chance of a Nobel prize than an average non-Jew. And most of the Hungarian Nobel prize-winners were Jews. Among chess world champions their proportion reaches – to my knowledge – more than 50%: Lasker, Steinitz, Tal, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Kasparov and Fischer are half Jewish. However, I claim that this is also socially determined. To mention a few factors: The first essential point is that Jewish families – partly because of strong traditions – are relatively stable, and they are always very concerned with education. Another reason comes from the minority status of Jews and from the frequent persecutions throughout their history. How do these factors contribute to the development of the mind? From a negative side in this way, that because of the always disadvantageous situation of the Jews they always had to appear in almost everything doubly more capable than others. Because of the frequent persecution they knew that at any time they might have to leave their homes, dwellings, and even homelands, and begin lives elsewhere. So what is fixed in Jewish tradition? “Learn, my son, because (1) only thus can you succeed in life, and (2) if you must flee, no one can take knowledge away from you, so you can take it with you anywhere.” Jews could not take their houses with them, so they customarily preferred to buy no houses or unportable things, but gold and diamonds and trinkets, so that during persecutions they could pocket them and run away. And their knowledge bore fruit everywhere. On the other hand, Jews are always on the periphery, and this awakens stresses in them; they become “eternal adolescents.” Adolescents do not know whether they are children or adults, and their uncertainty comes from this. Similarly, Jews most often do not know to what degree they are – for example – Hungarian, or Jewish, or both. This situation is difficult to clarify to themselves. Because of it they constantly live with internal conflict. This makes them develop with open minds, a habit of problem-solving, and also develops their adaptability. (This can also cause certain negative qualities, for example over-sensitivity, loudness, aggression, extremism, being critical of oneself and others, a very strong ambition for accomplishments, over-driven activity, etc.)

I want to emphasize a second time that I’ve left out most of the book, which is Polgar’s philosophical and moral reflections on why genius is important / why it’s ethical to try to raise children to be geniuses. If you’ve got any concerns in those areas, please look a little deeper into the source text and you’ll find them answered. At length. Twenty times. Interspersed with enthusiastic infodumps about how great Esperanto is.

In contrast, I said above that there wasn’t much specific pedagogical advice. I wrote that before quote-mining it to write a review; after doing so I realize there’s more than I thought. It’s just very broad, and not too different from what you’d expect a smart and up-to-date educator to say at your local slightly-hippy-ish private school.

I think the main reason I keep feeling like Polgar’s not describing his system enough – even though he describes it at some length – is a mismatch between his astounding results, and his excellent-but-not-that-different-from-common-sense educational advice. Surely there are schools that try to make children love learning and feel a sense of accomplishment in their work (don’t be snarky here, I’m as depressed as anyone by the education system but there are so many different private schools with wacky philosophies that I’m sure at least one of them has hit the target). But none of them have all their students grow up to be world-class chess grandmasters or the interdisciplinary equivalent. Why not?

Appealing to genetics can only take us so far. Both Polgar parents are undoubtedly geniuses. But a lot of wacky private schools get a steady supply of students with really smart parents. There’s got to be something more.

My guess is that the “start really early” and “concentrate on one subject” parts do more of the heavy lifting than I’d previously thought. I also think the one-to-one instruction (well, two-to-three instruction) that the Polgar parents were able to give their kids was probably very important, based on the disproportionate number of child prodigies who were home-schooled by their parents (I don’t know if the low teacher:student ratio or the parent-child relationship itself is important). And I suspect Polgar himself was just a naturally gifted educator who was able to effortlessly instill passion for a subject. Get those four things right – early start, single-subject focus, 1:1 home schooling, and a great parent/teacher – and the rest is just common-sense advice. Common-sense advice that lots of educators fail miserably at, admittedly. But common sense advice nonetheless.

This should be encouraging for people who want to repeat the Polgars’ experiment. You probably don’t need an education degree, let alone training in some secretive arcane Polgar Education Technique, to make it happen. You just need a monomaniacal focus, a lot of free time, and hard-to-define talent.

I think I have a lead on how to get this last one. Polgar talks about how he devised his system by reading the biographies of former child geniuses like John Stuart Mill. It might be useful to repeat this project, if only to see whether someone else can absorb some of the same implicit lessons Polgar did, and gain the same breadth of knowledge he had. This would be my next step from here if I wanted to try to learn more about education.

One concluding quote from Polgar:

There is no magic even in chess instruction, so I want to “warn” those who are expecting to discover miracles. The main pedagogical method and explanations of basic psychological ideas can be found naturally in pedagogical, psychological and technical chess textbooks.

There’s a word for someone who successfully performs miracles, writes a book called Perform Miracles! , and then “warns” those who are “expecting to discover miracles”. That word is “tease”. But Polgar gives us enough of a sketch to at least start out on the road he went on, and hopefully enough further leads to go the rest of the way.

231 Responses to Book Review: Raise A Genius!

Get those four things right – early start, single-subject focus, 1:1 home schooling, and a great parent/teacher – and the rest is pretty typical Montessori-style common-sense advice.

And that is what the “any 16 year old can mind kids, why require a college degree* to work in a childcare centre?” argument does not take into account: early start, ratio of staff to children, individual attention, focus on teaching what you’re teaching, even if it’s ‘only’ how to eat and drink and take turns, etc. Not at all the same thing as “stick them in front of the TV watching cartoons with a box of sugary cereal”.

I think Mr Polgar’s book is rather like if Leopold Mozart wrote a book about how “anyone can raise a musical prodigy kid!” Yes, if you’re already a composer and music teacher with two gifted (one extraordinarily so) children 🙂 Same way with the Polgars; the parents had talent for chess, the kids inherited that plus had a natural interest, and the father was able to teach them intensively. I think it would have been a different matter if he’d picked three random kids and tried teaching them something outside his area of competence.

Though I think he does have the correct emphasis that whatever subject or topic you pick for the intensive coaching, it must be something the child has an interest and capacity for. It’s no good trying to make a chess genius out of a kid whose natural talent is for cookery; turn them into a leading chef instead. That’s probably the big pitfall with anyone who wants to apply the Polgar method: don’t get caught up in what you want (a sports star, a master musician, a Nobel Prizewinner in science), rather tailor it to the child’s talents and interests.

*In Ireland we don’t require a college degree but we do require a Level 5 Certification , which is a vocational training award, for those wanting to work in childcare and day care centres.

I think this is the opposite of what Polgar believes. From the book:

“According to my principle one should not try to find talents, but choose an appropriate pedagogical method for developing the talents. The first characteristic of genius education – I could say the most important novelty distinguishing it from contemporary instruction – and its necessary precondition, is early specialization directed at one concrete field. It is indeed true what Homer said, “A person cannot be experienced or first in everything.” Because of this parents should choose a specific field at their discretion. It is only important that by the age of 3-4 some physical or mental field should be chosen, and the child can set out on their voyage.

“How much should parents intervene in the future of their children? Should they influence the choice of profession, partner or politics?” Let us begin with the choice of profession. I will speak only about parents who seriously endeavor to smooth the way for their children. Among them there are two types. Some say that a child should be many-faceted, “taste” everything, and in adulthood or close to it they should decide for themselves what they will do. I can also understand this standpoint. However, if the parents wish the children to achieve genius results, then – in my opinion – the parents’ decision should not be put off, and one should decide the direction of their specialization even in infancy.

So who is to decide what professional path a person will follow? If the decision is made by the parents, it can be made early, but a matter of vast consequence is placed wholly outside of the child’s control. If the decision is made by the child, it must be postponed into at least adolescence and will necessarily be made by someone with a more immature understanding. And in either case, except for the case of a parent deciding their child should follow them into their own profession or a related one, the choice is made without a clear understanding of what the actual work will be like. I’m a computer programmer, and I have a pretty vague idea of what the day-to-day work of a claims adjuster, lawyer, or plumber is like.

It’s a hard problem. I don’t see a good solution.

If I understand Polgár’s philosophy correctly, the decision must be made by parents, because it needs to be made early . Of course you can try multiple things and see how the child reacts. If you can’t make it a pleasant game, stop! But ultimately, you cannot expect a 3 years old child to make an informed decision about their future career. And you should not waste time, because human life is short, especially if you want to reach the genius levels.

It allegedly takes 10 000 hours to become a master. If you start at the age of 3, and spend 3 hours a day doing something, it is 1000 hours a year. That means you become a master at 13; and then you progress towards the genius levels. If instead you wait until you are 18 to choose your college and your specialization, you are left hopelessly behind.

Even worse, there will be the Matthew effect in action: The child genius will receive social rewards and support of various kinds, including financial support and better choice of school or jobs; in best case, they will never need to participate in the usual rat race, which in turn will allow them to further develop their talents, and get even more rewards. On the other hand, the kid who started specializing at 18 will be treated as a replaceable cog in the machine, will work 8+ hours a day at a soul-sucking job, and probably burn out.

Now of course there is a risk that the child grows up and tells you: “Dear parents, I really hate chess. I wish you would have given me piano lessons instead. Now that I am 18, I am not going to touch the chess board anymore.” (Or maybe it will be: “Dear parents, I really hate the piano. I wish you would have given me chess lessons instead. Now that I am 18, I am not going to touch the piano anymore.”) What about that?

Well, some degree of risk seems inevitable. Yes, we all wish we had a time machine to help us make better decision in the past based on the feedback from the future. And no, we don’t have the time machine (yet). But here are things that reduce the risk:

(1) If you keep it a game, the chance that the child will literally hate it is negligible. The worst case will be more like: “Dear parents, I am not really interested in chess (piano) anymore. I will start playing piano (chess) instead.” Which means the worst outcome in this method is like the best outcome of the usual method, i.e. spending 18 years browsing Facebook, and then deciding to play piano (chess).

(2) Being a child with several hundreds or thousands of hours of experience, shortly “a child prodigy”, will make the child admired and rewarded. That is a positive experience which the child will connect to the chess (or the piano), which increases the chance that the child will actually be happy about having been taught chess (or piano).

And by the way, it is not completely true that Polgár focused “near-obsessively on a single subject”. His three daughters also learned dozen foreign languages, and did a lot of sport. So in a parallel Everett branch, where they randomly received an anti-chess gene, they possibly still became successful linguists or translators. (And hopefully Polgár noticed the anti-chess gene soon enough and switched to something else; probably math.) Except, being the world’s best linguist (as opposed to being e.g. the world’s tenth best linguist) is not as visible as being the world’s best chess player, so in the parallel world the Polgár sisters are probably not internationally famous. But this was explicitly the reason (or rationalization) in the book for choosing chess.

And I agree that it is easier to teach your children your own profession or hobby, because you know that best.

(1) If you keep it a game, the chance that the child will literally hate it is negligible. The worst case will be more like: “Dear parents, I am not really interested in chess (piano) anymore. I will start playing piano (chess) instead.” Which means the worst outcome in this method is like the best outcome of the usual method, i.e. spending 18 years browsing Facebook, and then deciding to play piano (chess).

The worst outcome is like the “best” outcome of the usual method, reduced by the opportunity cost of not being able to spend 18 years browsing Facebook . Which is actually a pretty big reduction. It’s not zero cost just because browsing Facebook is low status and you can sneer at it (besides, the kid may have done something other than browse Facebook anyway.)

I mostly agree here and will add that I don’t think most children, adolescents, or adults, have nearly so strong preferences about what they will do as we might imagine.

Sure, we are “drawn” to certain things, and if a child is drawn to a particular pursuit from a young age, the Polgar method seems to say you can pick that (and presumably there’s no hard and fast rule saying you absolutely must stick with it if the child later decides he is obsessed with something else).

But the thing is, the level of effort needed to be professional at anything is usually much higher than anyone, especially a busy adult, will expend just for “fun.” At some point your passion becomes work when you decide to turn it into your job. Doesn’t mean you no longer feel passionate about it; just means it will always feel like “work” to some degree if you’re doing it enough to be a professional.

The alternative where you let the kids try a whole bunch of things and only specialize later sounds like it should be fun, but I think it may paradoxically leave most people bored and confused. People like things they are good at. Don’t let the child focus on any one thing long enough to be really good at it and he never establishes that positive feedback loop Polgar references where you can impress all your peers and even adults with your precocious ability at x.

Faced, at high school graduation, with the fact that he knows a little bit about a whole bunch of things, kind of likes but also feels a little ambivalent about a whole bunch of things, etc. and it isn’t unusual at all (in fact, I’d say it’s now the norm) for the college freshman to still be pretty uncertain about what he might like to major in, much less how he’d like to make a living.

And all these people are way behind the person who can always fall back on his virtuosic piano playing if whatever else he decided later to do doesn’t work out.

reduced by the opportunity cost of not being able to spend 18 years browsing Facebook. Which is actually a pretty big reduction.

I’m interested – aside from making social connections to more people your age, what’s the opportunity cost of not browsing Facebook? Presumably these homeschooled child geniuses will still be getting as much socialization as other homeschoolers.

The cost is that people like browsing Facebook, and it has value to them. Depriving them of it deprives them of value.

And remember, “Facebook” is just metonymy. It includes other things than actual Facebook.

Anecdote time!

This resonates with my experiences. I feel like I’m a good programmer, and I get a lot of enjoyment out of it. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that I started in Middle School. My parents aren’t engineers of any kind, so I don’t obviously have a preexisting leaning towards programming/engineering. I really ended up with computers early through happenstance. However, the positive social feedback from making cool software motivated me to work hard and thus see the sense of satisfaction that comes from becoming good at something. I also think the fact that particularly in my rural area programming had a high social value, and as a young person that made me feel good about learning it.

Now that I’m about to graduate college, I feel like one of the biggest blessings in my life has been knowing what I want to do since early on, and having the opportunity to get good at it. I see so many friends and acquaintances who still aren’t sure what they want to do in their lives, and maybe if they had just committed to one skill early on that wouldn’t be such a mental drain for them.

If I was raising a child, I would definitely encourage them to get really good at something and stick with it for as long as possible unless they absolutely hate it. Worst case you’ve learned a skill that you might not use much, but you’ll probably be at about the same place as everybody else (i.e. not knowing what to learn/do).

The reasons why chess is an outlier also happen to apply to computer programming.

And all these people are way behind the person who can always fall back on his virtuosic piano playing if whatever else he decided later to do doesn’t work out.

I think part of the problem is that you cannot rely on “falling back” on piano. You need to be quite excellent at playing piano to make a living off playing piano.

There are a few other points that come to mind: 1. I am sure there are a lot of parents who forced their kids to play piano from a young age, but there are no Mozarts in the last century (to my knowledge). 2. This really does not jive with the Scott Adams theory of success, which is more intuitive, which is based on the idea of leveraging different skills together. Like, the piano guy in the Piano Guys is probably not the most best piano player in the world, but he leverages his piano skills with other skills (like marketing the crap out of stuff on youtube) to achieve notoriety and success.

Obviously Polgar is trying to raise super-geniuses, but I am still skeptical, even if he’s going 3/3, and we’re talking about some sort of back-up to failure.

This really does not jive with the Scott Adams theory of success, which is more intuitive, which is based on the idea of leveraging different skills together

This is a good point and probably more true nowadays (in the “gig” economy) than in the past.

But I disagree that you have to be a Mozart to make a living off the piano. You may need to be an amazing piano player to make a really good living off it, but you can still make a living off being a pretty good piano player–playing at weddings and airport bars, etc.

Many people, even many college graduates, have literally no marketable skills of significance, which is why they work at McDonalds and Wal Mart, places where basically a medieval peasant could work.

When I say you can fall back on your piano skill, I mean that, even if you don’t turn out to be world-class in whatever thing your parents had you spend 10,000 hours on as a child, there’s a decent chance, if it is a marketable skill, that you can at least use it to keep the water and lights on if all else fails.

In my case, the tangible skill I learned in college most marketable outside academia was foreign language. Because I can speak and read a couple foreign languages at a high level, I can always use that ability to work as a translator or interpreter. I don’t like these jobs and they don’t pay very well if you’re not working at the UN, but they sure beat Wal Mart and McDonalds.

And I think it’s interesting, therefore, that Polgar chose foreign language to be another major focus of his education curriculum.

Also, re. Adams, I think something only counts as part of your talent “stack” if you have learned it well enough to reach the sort of level I’m describing–not necessarily world class, but could use it to put food on the table if you really had to. The problem with today’s education system is it’s so diffuse in focus that you end up not being good enough at anything to achieve even that level, much less the world-class genius level, which I’m pretty sure everyone here agrees requires some inborn talent in addition to a lot of enthusiasm and time spent in childhood.

@ADBG – I’m not sure what your criteria are for being Mozart, but on the violin, Sarah Chang and Midori Goto were pretty well-known and impressive child prodigies (who have gone on to have successful careers as soloists). For composers, I would argue that Shostakovich’s First Symphony is better than anything Mozart had written at the age of 19 (though this is admittedly a matter of taste). And then more recently there’s Alma Deutscher , whose parents, from what I can gather, seem to be adopting more or less Polgar’s strategy: homeschooling, with intense study of a single subject from an early age, but with emphasis on making it a fun and creative process for their child.

Interestingly, Chang, Midori, and Deutscher’s Wikipedia articles all mention early performances in association with Zubin Mehta – I didn’t know of him having any reputation for working with child prodigies, but now that I think about it, if he worked with a few it may have become self-fulfilling in that everyone wants to send the next star his way.

edit: I’m not quite sure what your point is more generally, but if it’s that the success rate of people who think their child will be a famous musician is incredibly low, that’s of course true. (But it’s also probably true that most of the people forcing their child to play piano from a young age are not trying to replicate Polgar’s experiment. Rather, many are 1. coercing the children in ways that Polgar would rightly object to, and 2. trying to make their children successful mathematicians/businesspeople/etc at the same time, rather than actually focusing on one thing.)

Here is where I am probably going to disagree with you:

When I say you can fall back on your piano skill, I mean that, even if you don’t turn out to be world-class in whatever thing your parents had you spend 10,000 hours on as a child, there’s a decent chance, if it is a marketable skill, that you can at least use it to keep the water and lights on if all else fails. In my case, the tangible skill I learned in college most marketable outside academia was foreign language. Because I can speak and read a couple foreign languages at a high level, I can always use that ability to work as a translator or interpreter. I don’t like these jobs and they don’t pay very well if you’re not working at the UN, but they sure beat Wal Mart and McDonalds.

The Polgar Sisters are intelligent enough to pursue educations that will enable employment besides Wal Mart and McDonalds. The relevant trade-off is not Piano Player vs. McDonalds. It is Piano Player vs. Generic UMC job (doctor, banker, etc.)

Piano players make like $52k a year according to payscale, with no benefits, and bad hours. That may be a biased sample, but Payscale says it does NOT increase with experience, so I think this is possibly a “winner-take-all” market where going from the First Best Piano Player to Hundredth Best Piano Player moves you from Big Salary to Median salary.

In contrast, I went to a second-tier state university, in business school. These kids are reasonably intelligent, but not super-intelligent, and generally now make wages that range from $60k-$120k, with benefits, at age 30.

Polgar says he can do this with ANY kid, but I assume most kids actually able to become “Genius” are in the upper 25% of the IQ distribution, and are giving up some valuable career prospects to chase “genius.”

Opportunity Cost is quite high.

Also, if I want to pursue genius? Something tells me chess players are not able to command the salaries of top executives, and there are more top executives than top chess players.

I realize the last is unfairly moving the goal posts (talking about whether we should raise geniuses is different than talking about whether we CAN raise geniuses), but it’s not unfair to suggest that this might not be the best societal move since there are other kinds of “genius” we need.

Also, if college kids are graduating without marketable skills, or even high school kids are graduating without marketable skills, I think there’s a good argument for reforming the education system. Additionally, I can just tell ADBG Jr. “major in accounting” and avoid those pit-falls.

scherzando, Thanks for the background. I am not familiar with any of these people, or the industry. They are not households names yet.

I agree that the parents may not be following the Polgar method, maybe the Polgar method would be more successful. Perhaps they would be.

However, the reason the parents push their kids to do different things is so they can have good careers and backup options. I wouldn’t want a kid mid-25 who can’t do anything but play piano and can’t find a decent job playing piano. I’d be heart-broken.

My bigger point is #2, anyways, which is that single-minded competency is not the most in-demand kind of genius. I do not know who Sarah Chang is, but I sure know who Warren Buffet is. I don’t think you can teach a 3- or 4- year old stockpicking.

@ADBG: late to the party, so you might not see it; but I’m surprised by this claim:

>Polgar says he can do this with ANY kid, but I assume most kids actually able to become “Genius” are in the upper 25% of the IQ distribution, and are giving up some valuable career prospects to chase “genius.” > Opportunity Cost is quite high.

Presumably if you’re following Polgar’s method, and by age of 16-18 it’s clear that the genius thing is not really working out, you can still fall back to the ‘generic banker career’ – elementary/high school-level education not being very useful in the first place, and more of a ‘place to store children so parents can work’. Hell, you could go to college at 21-24 and not be far behind others by the time you’re 30+.

Yes, but I still think the best results are building on what is already there. You can probably decide “my three week old child will be a boxing superstar” and drill them in that up to the age of fifteen or so, but I think you’ll go a lot further in getting a future heavyweight unified title champion if the kid is going to grow up tall, strong, nimble on the feet, has the boxing brain, and can take a punch than if they’re a short asthmatic with a glass jaw and two left feet.

I defy even Laszlo Polgar to take two year old me and turn me into a La Scala standard opera singer 🙂

Right. Polgar does not appear to allow much of a role in the process for innate talent, or acknowledge that the degree to which it’s important might vary dependent on the chosen specialism. I suspect that the proportion of humans capable of being world class chess players if brought up in this way is vastly greater than the proportion capable of being world class sprinters – and I suspect that only around 10 or 15% of the population would be capable of the former.

That said, if you had asked me before reading about Polgar what proportion of the population were capable of being world class chess players based on innate talent my estimate would have been a lot lower than 10-15%.

And this is why a pet peeve of mine for many years has been how teacher hiring works. If good teachers make a huge difference(and anyone can tell you that they do), we should make more effort to select teachers by quality instead of by seniority. Yes, it’s true that there’s no foolproof system for doing so. But refusing to even try is grossly destructive.

this is hotly contested issue: do good students make the teacher, or do teachers make good students

A top 1% teacher in ability, conscientiousness, and compassion (assuming those things could be quantified) would probably have the most beneficial impact on kids in the top 1%. A good teacher can help a gifted kid realize his or her full potential, but cannot make an average kid exceptional.

and anyone can tell you that they do

There’s no evidence to support this. See TEACHERS: MUCH MORE THAN YOU WANTED TO KNOW .

>In summary: teacher quality probably explains 10% of the variation in same-year test scores. A +1 SD better teacher might cause a +0.1 SD year-on-year improvement in test scores. This decays quickly with time and is probably disappears entirely after four or five years, though there may also be small lingering effects.

The educational outcome is an interaction of: the teacher, the student, the classroom, the school administration, the parents, and more factors (e.g. the teachers in previous grades). Trying to reduce it to one factor is doomed to fail. For example, you could have a top 1% teacher and a top 1% student… and the rest of the class disrupting every lesson, and the administration refusing to admit that there is a problem that needs to be addressed.

Also, there are not enough “miraculous teachers”, if we need a school at every corner, sufficiently cheap, and without automation because we are superstitious about that. Our school system is McDonalds, not Jamie Oliver; and it even wouldn’t make sense to hire Jamie Oliver and then make him work in the McDonalds system.

And, as Grey Enlightenment said, different students have different potential, and would probably benefit from different types of teachers. In my personal experience, I would roughly divide students into two groups: willing to cooperate, and unwilling to cooperate. With the former group, the main task is to transform the knowledge into materials that are pleasant (or at least not actively unpleasant) to use, let the kids use them, and provide consultations when necessary. With the latter group, it is sadly all about keeping discipline in the classroom, and the results will be mediocre anyway. Mixing these two types of students together is a recipe for disaster, which also happens to be the norm.

If good teachers make a huge difference (and anyone can tell you that they do),

Trust me, some students (and their parents) complain about those good teachers, too. People complain about being told more than the bare minimum of information required to pass the tests. People complain about having stuff explained too easily, so it doesn’t feel high status anymore. People complain about having stuff explained at all, when they could instead simply memorize it in shorter time. (Generally, whenever you hear people complain about teachers doing X, someone else is probably complaining about a teacher not doing X.) Some people also complain about not being allowed to play Angry Birds in the classroom.

There is no way to make everyone happy. However you select the “good teachers”, many people will complain that they suck, because they are not doing things their preferred way.

Sometimes I dream about having a “market” solution to there problems. Like, having different teachers, and letting students (or their parents?) freely choose which teacher’s lessons they want to attend. A teacher without students would be fired. A teacher could ban a student from his lessons; and a student banned from all lessons, and unable to pass exams otherwise, would also be fired. Also, separate teaching from exams; the teacher’s (and the whole school’s) job would be only to teach; the students would be examined by a separate institution. This would nicely integrate with homeschooling; or partial homeschooling, where a student would attend some subjects at school, and learn other subjects at home. Students (and their parents (and their lawyers)) could no longer blackmail teachers into giving good grades by threatening to complain about their teaching methods; the teacher would have no direct impact on the outcome of exams.

The problem with this “market” solution is that at the elementary or high school level you usually do not have enough people at the same place to create a functional marketplace. People have a preference for having their kids study near their home. Students are separated by age. Teachers are specialized by subjects. So if you have an elementary school with 500 kids, that makes about 60 kids per grade, that is about 2 parallel classrooms, so you have 2 teachers for that subject; not much competition.

Well, I was a semi-cooperative student– willing to learn somewhat, but not put in a lot of effort.

As for how far Polgar’s project could be replicated, the whole thing can’t be done for everyone, but it offers some clues for improvement.

What do you think of the theory that children have an innate strong desire to learn (walking and talking take work), but it gets knocked out of them by conventional schooling?

Standards for teaching: I would settle for no child having to deal with any really bad teachers and every child having a good chance at an excellent teacher. This is based on seeing people say that one good teacher was enough to put them on a path of learning, and other people say that one bad teacher led them to give up, at least on a subject.

One thing to look at is setting up teaching so that children get a sense of accomplishment for real achievements. It reminds me of someone who said that she was wasn’t raising children, she was raising adults.

I think that children have specific interests that don’t necessarily line up with that is good for them/society. A kid who watches cartoons or plays computer games all day learns too, but its not the kind of knowledge that usually gets people a job.

@Aapje: I learned quite a lot of English from playing computer games as a child (in the early 90s pretty much no games were translated to Czech). A lot of my classmates were playing in the park instead or something like that (I also did that, but less often than the average child, I think). Arguably, I learned more than them. I also had this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work software, sort of a game-encyclopedia thingy, I loved playing with it and probably learned a lot from it. We also had a lot of history books at home since my mother is a history teacher and I read all of those which contained pictures. So at the age of 10 I knew the structure of the Republican and Imperial Roman army, the names of their weapons, I knew the entire story of Iliad and Odyssey (from a kids comic book kids version but nonetheless) and a bunch of other things. On the other hand, I’ve always been quite hazy on Czech history, particularly the early centuries since I only learned about that at school and it was not presented in an entertaining way.

Generally speaking I never learned anything that I wasn’t interested in, or at best I learned it only to a level required to get a decent grade and then forgot it immediately afterwards. I suspect that I am not quite unique in this and so I think that the way things are taught at school is usually really bad. Maybe a difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher is simply making things entertaining. Then the children actually learn it themselves.

There might be people who are simply uninterested in learning “anything useful” from the very beginning. For them the traditional schooling might make sense, or at least a version of it which teaches them a marketable skill and doesn’t bother then with other things they are going to forget anyway. I think most children don’t fit into that category, but it might just be the bubble I’m living it.

I learned quite a lot of English from playing computer games as a child (in the early 90s pretty much no games were translated to Czech). A lot of my classmates were playing in the park instead or something like that (I also did that, but less often than the average child, I think). Arguably, I learned more than them.

They might have learned more social skills 🙂

Anyway, while you are correct that you usually learn something useful, my point was more that you generally need a somewhat coherent set of skills that is useful for an adult/in your job, which is not automatically what kids gravitate to.

In general, a major benefit of school is that you learn skills where you later figure out when they are useful, but if you never got pushed/mentored into learning those things, you might never know what useful things you don’t yet know.

@Aapje: Oh yes. Social skills. I forgot about those 😀

I guess that this is indeed the strongest argument for the classical curriculum and against unschooling. That is, some things might require a period of a rather boring introduction to become interesting enough and you cannot really say whether you like this or that before you learn enough about it. I’m not sure how strong an argument it really is. Some things definitely need some introduction to be understood and possibly judged but I don’t think you really need years of that. I think it might be an argument for slight nudging – making the children learn the basic outlines of a lot of things fairly quickly and then letting them choose and continue more or less with unschooling methods. For me the most changes which might have required more exposure were in music and art in general. But I am not sure how much it was influenced by prolonged exposure to music and playing a musical instrument and how much it was me getting older. But as far as skills you learn at the school go, I don’t think I ever suddenly became interested in something after having studied it for x years at school (in fact often the effect of schooling was the exact opposite, at best good teachers were able to rekindle the interest in me that previous teachers snuffed).

“Good teachers” alone aren’t really enough — if it was that simple, then private schools would be churning out geniuses left, right, and center. I suspect it’s the intensive, individually tailored curriculum, taught by a single teacher (or small group of teachers) over a long period of time who really understand the child .

I was in a gifted program for a few years in middle school and it was a huge improvement over the rest of the public school system. The teachers seemed “better”, sure, but the reduced class size (12 students) played a role there, I suspect. The real difference was being surrounded by truly exceptional peers for the first time: I wasn’t great at math, but when your best friends have been attending evening classes at college since they turned 11, it’s harder not to pick up some things. If I got stuck on anything, our teachers always had time to spare to help — but often they weren’t even necessary, as my classmates frequently knew just as much and were willing to lend a hand. We covered years of official curriculum in a couple of semesters, and when we ran out of official curriculum, we pivoted to self-study of subjects that interested us, guided by our teachers every step of the way as they taught us how to teach ourselves .

My family moved across the country when I was set to enter high school, and I went from a class of the top 1% in a major metropolitan school board to a rural high school with 500 students: 3 years in the gifted program was enough to completely trivialize the next 4 years of high school for me, and as much as I begged my parents to let me “test out” and enter college early, they refused. In retrospect, I could’ve made the most of the situation and used that time to hone my social skills. Instead I spent it bitter and alone and writing passive-aggressive letters to the school administration because they insisted on closing the library every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday due to a “staff shortage” (which was, somehow, never resolved in my 4 year time there) leaving me without anywhere to read in peace. A great teacher could’ve done their best to help me work around the system, but when it comes to actually teaching, I suspect they’d be too encumbered by the curriculum (and their responsibilities split among too many other students) to really make a difference.

Anyway, I wasn’t a genius, but I suspect a couple of my classmates in that gifted program would’ve qualified. The ones who were really successful had support at home, and had been tutored (either by their well-educated parents, or their older siblings) from an early age, were constantly challenged (and overcame said challenges), and had a real love for learning instilled upon them. For these students who were already set to be geniuses — I don’t know how much they were getting out of the gifted program. The real benefactors were the students like me who, through mere proximity, could be pulled along those genius’ vortices and reach higher than expected. Peers can teach in a way schoolteachers cannot, though I’m not sure it’s fair to ask that of them when they could be pursuing their own success and refining their own genius.

Ideally, yes. But what if you have a school district run primarily for the benefit of the politicians who control the school district? They will see teaching as patronage jobs and will pay/promote/hire/fire based on what gives the ruling politicians the best political/financial advantage.

I think it would have been a different matter if he’d picked three random kids and tried teaching them something outside his area of competence.

To make a slightly different but related point, how sure are you we aren’t just looking at author selection bias here? Imagine if a guy created a new gambling system, went to Las Vegas for a day and cleaned out through sheer luck. His book on his gambling system would sell like hot cakes, but there would be ten thousand other guys who didn’t have any luck and didn’t get to write books about their systems. We don’t know their names, we only know of their existence by inference. But the lucky winner’s system is just as much rubbish as theirs.

This was addressed in the previous article and the discussion ( 1 , 2 ). The short version is that “it was mere luck, plus high IQ” is not a sufficient explanation for having literally 3 teenage chess grandmasters at one family.

I don’t know how many people write books about their ability to bring up genius children and court their future wives on the basis of “let’s raise genius children together using my method”. I doubt there are ten thousand of them. But I think the stronger counterargument is that he had three kids and his record was 3/3. The most certain way to eliminate survivorship bias is to repeat the experiment. He did. Twice. I’m willing to believe this one.

due to regression of the mean, it’s near-impossible that anyone would have three kids capable of succeeding at chess due to biological intelligence alone (although of course high biological intelligence was a necessary permissive factor). That a person obsessed with educating people into geniuses should strike this one-in-a-million chance beggars the imagination. I’m not saying these people don’t probably have top 1% IQs. I’m saying that 70 million people worldwide have top 1% IQs, so something else must be going on here.

but that is not an independent controlled environment

Sure, it is weaker evidence than having 3 child geniuses raised independently.

But it is stronger evidence than only having 1 child genius raised — by a person who publicly precommitted to raise a child genius! — which already would be… at least, worth attention.

It is an argument against some competing explanations which would be more convincing in case of having only 1 child genius, such as “she just got lucky at the tournament” or “she luckily got a mutation of a chess superpower gene” or “she luckily got an optimal combination of chess genes from her two parents, allowing her to surpass both”. — The luck required by 3 sisters would be several orders of magnitude less likely than luck required by one. The random mutation would need to happen 3 times at the same family. Even the optimal combination of parental genes happening 3 times in a row is less likely than it happening only once.

On the other hand, it creates another competing explanation that “having siblings who play chess” is the true ‘one weird trick’ to become a grandmaster. Especially if the younger sisters had more success; they were exposed to a chess-playing sibling for longer parts of their lives. (The book provides an alternative explanation to the last one: the oldest sister faced bureaucratic obstacles when trying to participate in the adult nongendered tournaments; the younger sisters could use an existing precedent.)

by a person who publicly precommitted to raise a child genius!

He precommitted, just like every quack and loon and educational fad peddler ‘precommitted’, by making vague promises of some great success and then painting a circle around the success if any, while insisting you ignore that he never specified what exactly the success would be in advance and all the other failed projects- the golfer who said 10,000 hours would make him a PGA pro, the Chinese parent who wrote a book on how to get your child into Harvard, the list just goes on and on and on. Every year brings in new fads like ‘growth mindset’ with their books & paid speeches & training courses even before the old ones have been debunked or faded into obscurity. Look at actually comprehensive meta-analyses rather than cherrypicked examples, and you see that failure is the norm and the field is strewn with nulls with occasional small effects (eg http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/handbook_fryer_03.25.2016.pdf or http://coalition4evidence.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/IES-Commissioned-RCTs-positive-vs-weak-or-null-findings-7-2013.pdf ). If you aren’t deeply cynical and disgusted by the quality of research in education, you are not paying attention.

If you aren’t deeply cynical and disgusted by the quality of research in education, you are not paying attention.

What does this have to do with polgar? Grit, growth mindset, etc, as promoted, are obvious bullshit insofar as one dogma never fits all, without needing to see any studies. As it happens the studies I’ve read have also been a joke, asking questions which are blatant proxies for past actual success and general togetherness, but Polgar is not relying on any cooked studies, he is relying on the strength of his argument and a few “spectacular” successes (called in advance). How can you condemn polgar by means of these fads? Please explain the relation if you would maintain this position.

I guess I didn’t make my point sufficiently clear. I’m talking basically about publication bias. I suspect that there are tons of smart parents who had tried to bring up their kids as geniuses and didn’t get any results that were worth publicizing. Or, maybe, they had 3 kids, more-or-less succeeded with 1 and the other two turned out about what one would expect based on their parents’ IQ, SES and whatever. Would anybody write or publish a book about how he has this brilliant theory about genius education, tried it on his 3 kids and more-or-less succeeded with only one?

It’s probably easier than you think, since the parent is also a chess grandmaster, and is relentlessly drilling them since age 3 or 4. Don’t believe his bullshit about education theory; a dominating parent willing to control a child’s life to achieve an outcome probably will get that outcome, unless the outcome requires more than innate ability.

And keep in mind this is chess, which mostly is a memorization game. If you force your child to memorize and play chess four hours a day for 12+ years, chances are they will be very good at it. Most of the difference between grandmasters and normal people is that normal people aren’t going to obsessively memorize a massive amount of chess openings, midgames, and endgames to evaluate positions. Especially starting at age 3!

I agree ..there are possible methodological errors in trying to make an inference from Polgar’s successes. AFAIK, it hasn’t been replicated under a controlled environment. It’s an appealing story but the science is sketchy

Though I think he does have the correct emphasis that whatever subject or topic you pick for the intensive coaching, it must be something the child has an interest and capacity for. It’s no good trying to make a chess genius out of a kid whose natural talent is for cookery; turn them into a leading chef instead. That’s probably the big pitfall with anyone who wants to apply the Polgar method: don’t get caught up in what you want (a sports star, a master musician, a Nobel Prizewinner in science), rather tailor it to the child’s talents and interests.

Because cooking is not impressed unto any specific domain of intelligence (except for perhaps math when reading measurements and verbal when reading cookbooks), talent in this instance is almost synonymous with interest/desire, than innate ability. If one seeks to create a superstar, it would be prudent to choose something that does not require much innate ability and that the child expresses an interest in.

Did the Polgar parents know a lot about chess? I don’t think Laszlo was more than a hobby player, if even that. For the first few years you probably don’t have to know much about chess to teach it to a child and later you hire a grandmaster.

Glad to see that the translation is complete.

With the caveat that I haven’t read it yet, I’m not quite sure what more you want in terms of Polgar’s ‘recipe.’ Start training your kids at a very young age, focusing on a single topic with a concrete endpoint and clear signs of progress along the way, while taking care to make sure that your kids don’t experience it as a joyless slog. Those really don’t sound like common sense ideas to me.

Since you have read it, how do you think the Polgar method would work with the idea of “gamifying” education? The method seems to rely on generating interest in the subject and on the child seeing clear signs that they’re making progress. But not all fields provide that sort of feedback or naturally provoke that kind of interest. Using the same techniques MMORPGs do to keep players grinding might be useful for kids grinding away at a difficult subject.

Gamification has been a recurring educational fad. Doesn’t seem to work very well for most subjects. The very fact that it tends to come and go argues that it doesn’t really work, like diets. There used to be “multimedia educational games” sold on CDs in the 90s which attempted to use similar techniques; their name was legion; I saw maybe a dozen. Developing a taste for instant gratification is the most likely outcome.

I guess the devil is in the details. How specifically do you make sure that your kids will like chess? I have a 2 years old daughter, and she pretty much refuses to do anything that wasn’t her own idea. I can’t make her throw me a ball, ever. She often complains about having to bath, or having to sit at table while eating. Right now I can hardly imagine that a year or two later I will tell her: “you can only move the king on the adjacent square, and then it’s my turn” and she would be like: “sure, Daddy, whatever you say”. (Of course, two years is a lot of time, this could change.)

At two years old, their favourite word is “No!” 🙂

What dreadful stereotyping of two year olds!

and “I’m already dead”

Yes, this. I have a several nieces and nephews, the oldest being 6. The 3-5 year olds do not sit for any serious instruction on anything.

They can’t even color in-between the lines!

Mrs. ADBG is teaching the 6 year old some piano, and tries to make it exciting with Disney music. The 6 year old still hates her practicing and isn’t really fond of her lessons, so apparently it’s not been “gamified” really well.

It’s honestly just a struggle to get these kids to learn their ABCs, how to sign their name, and some basic match and reading (all of which is apparently required by kindergarten these days).

Who cares about being a “genius” and why?

Some people enjoy doing things (it’s called having a hobby), and it is better if you are so great at your hobby that people in your social group admire you, and if you have a chance to get a well-paying job based on your hobby.

You can treat such outcome as a matter of blind fate, or as something that parents can help their children achieve (at least the parents and children with sufficiently high IQ).

There’s a big difference between “enjoy doing thing” and “genius at thing”. Not everyone really cares if they are “admired” for any particular talent, so it seems strange to spend so much time and energy on developing one in a child.

According to Scott’s review, Polgar spends quite many pages elaborating on this. I haven’t yet read the book, but my thoughts:

I would personally be a bit sad if I’d never manage to achieve anything of importance when I maybe could have. The only way to know for sure is to try. And it’s easier to achieve something if your parents give you head start.

Many find the call of ambition alluring. “A person is not truly dead as long as their name is spoken.” I don’t know if the ambition creates happiness, but it certainly occasionally creates men and women whose names are not forgotten. And of those persons whose names we do remember, I’m not probably alone in suggesting that we should respect more the geniuses in arts and sciences than the generals and politicians. Empires come and go, but Archimedes had more positive net impact than the Roman general who led the conquest of Syracuse.

Would you rather live in a world where more people strive to excel at what they do, or fewer? A world where people seek knowledge to their best capability, whether it’s the knowledge of a skill in arts like chess and Go or knowledge like understanding of the details of the universe’s internal workings or mathematical truths, or the world where they in general don’t?

A desire to do and create is not exactly that weird. Consider fiction. The story where Bilbo decides to stay on his porch smoking his pipe until the end of his days and never goes anywhere is maybe full of pleasant descriptions of ordinary happenings in a life of an ordinary upper-class hobbit, but it would be a short and boring read (and possibly ends in Sauron winning at the end).

As a former homeschooler and current student of hobbitness: You can explore and create without leaving behind hobbit comforts. (After all, Bilbo eventually returned to the Shire and spent most of the remainder of his life there.) Hobbit comforts are not a concession, not meant to be gamified or used as educational tools, and don’t exclude also being an intellectual adventurer.

My big non-abuse-related objection to this monolithic ‘My Homeschooled Kid Must, Can, and Will Be A Genius’ philosophy (a common trope of the homeschool community circlejerk) is that emotional and practical comfort/self-care fall by the wayside to make more time for study, practice, helping educate siblings, etc. Polgar comes across this way to me; it’s an attractive approach for narcissists who want impressive offspring (not necessarily emotionally functional ones).

As the parent of homeschooled kids, who meets a lot of other homeschooled kids through our activities, I find the “super-high achieving homeschooler” to be the outlier, rather than the norm.

In fact, I find that I meet more kids who are emotionally well-adjusted, compared to their public-schooled peers. My kids know how to talk to adults, and my eldest (age 9) actually enjoys talking to adults more than kids right now. (This is its own problem when my wife and I want to have private conversations in the evening!)

I know a lot of homeschooled kids who are polite, well-mannered, and socially well-adjusted because they aren’t trapped in the single-grade-level public school system. They’ve learned to talk to people of all ages.

This is not to say that the crazy high-achieving types don’t exist; they obviously do. But they’re much less common than stereotypes would have you think. (As are the crazy, controlling, Christian Fundamentalists.)

Hmm. Maybe the well-adjusted homeschool parents don’t make a habit of going online to brag/circlejerk/complain, and therefore I don’t get exposed to them. It’s a relief to know they apparently exist en masse IRL.

@Fiona van Dahl

Yeah, you got it in one. There are absolutely parents who use their homeschooling as a way to brag on how awesome their kids (and therefore the parents themselves) are. But this isn’t limited to the homeschool community, as any trip through any school will tell you. There are a lot of parents out there living vicariously through their kids.

Come to a Cub Scout meeting with us. Our pack is the homeschool pack for the local area, so all the kids are homeschooled. Yeah, we’ve got a couple crazies. We also have a higher proportion of invested parents than other units. And I meet a whole lot of emotionally well-adjusted kids.

Just to clarify, I wasn’t thinking about a homeschooling in particular while writing that, but why someone might value achieving things, especially intellectual achievements. Or maybe “curiosity” is a better word or a healthier attitude (but I don’t think it’s totally disentangled from “ambition”.)

Unless the local schools are abysmally bad (not only useless, but will hurt your kid’s education) and there are no other options (because of distance or monetary reasons), I am not personally a fan of homeschooling (neither categorically against it). It’s probably not a good idea to be in charge of your kids education alone (sanity checks and all that); but if you can get a group of adults who are professionals in their respective fields to participate in a tutoring a group of kids, I could see how it might be more ideal than the usual school experience.

But any way on the topic of “head start”, there’s also less drastic measures than pulling the kids out of official system. Usually you can do quite much even within the framework of the official system. As a personal experience, my parents encouraged me to enroll in open university while in high school. Where I live it’s relatively cheap, and while my HS wasn’t bad, it was certainly more interesting.

edit. oops, meant to write “It’s probably not a good idea”

Usually you can do quite much even within the framework of the official system.

The official system will make the child repeatedly waste 45 minutes listening to explanations of something they already know. Then finally you have an afternoon, which you have to split between actual learning and free time — which one would you rather sacrifice? (Maybe in different countries the flexibility of the official system is different, so this may not apply.)

But in my opinion, the greatest danger of school is the possibility of bullying. Which in my opinion happens quite often. And the easiest way to get bullied is to be somehow different from the norm. For example, being smarter.

I think Wayne Gretzky is interesting in this vein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Gretzky It’s not clear how natural his gifts were. What is clear is that he invested so much more time into hockey and related efforts that he was simply playing at a higher level than those around him. Nature is important, but so is nurture.

Gretzky is sometimes brought up in these contexts, as he was not obviously dominant in terms of speed, size and strength. So, he wasn’t a naturally talented athlete as usually conceived.

However: 1. Sports like hockey require certain mental abilities. It’s not clear that those are the result of nurture, though obviously Gretzky developed them through study. 2. Gretzky did have some extremely impressive physical attributes. He was, for example, famous for never getting tired. A lot of his dominance came in the third period. I don’t think that’s the kind of thing that can really be much developed beyond a certain point.

The “start early” thing makes me think about sports stars: a lot of the world’s greatest athletes (such as Venus and Serena Williams) had parents who made them play a lot of their chosen sport starting at a very young age. If you have a naturally fairly talented kid with an extra decade of practice doing a thing they might very well become world-class at that thing. Pulling that off without burning the kid out is pretty notable, though, so good on him. This argument suggests Polgar’s method won’t make polymaths; the Polgar sisters might be exceptionally good at chess, but they’re not going to have any other skills unusual for a highly intelligent person raised by good parents.

I’m torn between “I’m not sure I can predict any subjects will be useful two decades from now, so I’m not sure the cost-benefit analysis works out in favor of intensive education unless you happen to specifically desire that your child be a tennis star or a chess grandmaster” and “TINY FIVE-YEAR-OLD ECONOMIST.”

The method at least made Polgar’s kids polyglots, which is a very useful skill in and of itself.

But we already knew how to make kids polyglots. You give them opportunities they care about to actually use the language. That is why most Europeans are multilingual and most of the Anglosphere is not.

Judit Polgar speaks four languages, which about 10% of Europeans do; that’s remarkable but not that remarkable for a smart Hungarian.

Right, and what is the POINT of making kids polyglots? Another way to show off or is there some sort of significant usefulness that warrants the significant time dedication?

Well, for many Europeans, the point is that they live in a country where more than one language is spoken, so they need to know more than one language to manage daily life.

In other countries which might not speak English, knowing English is pretty important.

It’s pretty nice to speak let’s say English and Chinese. Gives you access to a lot of information. Foreign languages also have useful concepts, you wouldn’t come across in your mother tongue.

edanm: yeah, I originally included that as an example of “usefulness” but figured it was obvious. I think it’s far more likely that parents see polyglot kids (like any other exceptional talent or skill) as an opportunity to show off than that there’s some significant benefit (outside those you raised) to speaking multiple languages.

So they don’t have to be filthy plebs who rely on others to make subs/dubs of their favorite chinese cartoons?

What is the point of giving your kids skills? What is the point of helping your kids be smart, or healthy, or happy?

Why does your kid need to learn to walk? Teach him a desk profession and the effort the child expends will have been nothing but a waste of time. Confine your children to their chairs. ‘Toddling’ is the first sign of arrogance.

Dude, no one is arguing that you shouldn’t teach kids anything . Children have a limited number of hours in which to learn skills, so you can’t possibly teach your child everything they could learn, so you have to prioritize. Asking about prioritization is not the same thing as saying that you shouldn’t teach them at all.

limited number of hours in which to learn skills

Is it normal for people to actually get close to/reach this limit?

Right, and what is the POINT of making kids polyglots?

I am answering what the point is, the point is to help your children.

It doesn’t sound like asking ‘is there more efficient ways’ it sounds like asking if there is even any basic value.

Dude, no one is arguing that you shouldn’t teach kids anything.

As near as I can tell, that is (roughly) Scott’s espoused position. See him citing examples of genius mathematicians emerging fully formed from the slums of India.

I don’t think it’s his actual position. But I’m not sure he could espouse his actual position.

ETA: When I asked Scott for his actual position, he just gave me a link to his proposed “graduation speech” wherein he mocks/chides/derides the students for thinking their education was worth it., and asks them wouldntnthey rather have all the money that was spent on their education.

To paraphrase Hans Gruber, we could all be on the beach earning 20%.

carvenvisage: so you would logically equate the ability to walk with the ability to speak multiple languages? Great, but not congruent with my value system. If the “point” is to “help your children” (how does it help?), could you imagine a scenario in which alternative activities would help more? Why not do those? How do you decide which activities to make available to your children? Methinks many parents choose activities that have the best chance of making their child appear “impressive”. This is basic social conditioning. I’m not sure it’s as controversial as you suggest.

Spookykou: I expect so, with reasonable limits on e.g. television-watching. Many things we don’t think of as academic (unstructured play, socializing with friends) teach assorted useful skills as well.

“what’s the point” is a different question from “how efficient is it”, it’s questioning the basic value of something, not the relative. And when you complain about people ‘showing off’ it sounds even more like you resent effort others expend on their children.

You’re now saying that isn’t what you meant, and I guess I believe you, but I stand by my interpretation of your initial phrasing.

Getting children to learn to speak a language is possibly the easiest thing you could do. Everyone has known how to do it since at least the dawn of mankind.

Well. Almost everyone.

Tiger Woods is another such success story.

This argument suggests Polgar’s method won’t make polymaths; the Polgar sisters might be exceptionally good at chess, but they’re not going to have any other skills unusual for a highly intelligent person raised by good parents.

We don’t need to speculate, we have fairly detailed biographies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Polgar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofia_Polgar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polgár

No notable accomplishments outside of Chess.

What we don’t know is what percentage of parents who try to ‘start early’ get nowhere, as opposed to making Williams sisters or Tiger Woods or the Polgars. Probably that percentage is extremely high. This has to be weighted very heavily – what’s the expected value for your child of all this work? The question isn’t ‘is it worth this effort for my child to be successful in this field,’ the question is ‘is it worth it for my child to have a much greater chance at being successful in this field, which still means there’s a 97% chance they don’t meet the spectacular success necessary to justify those hours.’

I’m abstractly in favor of letting children have jobs and make money. Is it remotely worth it just from a monetary perspective to spend 48hrs a week practicing Chess, even if 1/3 will meet with stunning success? Even earning minimum wage they could accumulate a very significant chunk of money that could be very useful upon reaching adulthood. Working 48hrs a week at $8 an hr you make like $20k a year. How much prize or sponsorship money per year have the Polgar sisters earned, on avg? Though you can’t really send your kids out to earn $8/hr 48hrs a week in the first world, I think it is worth making the comparison.

There’s an up-and-coming example of this in basketball in Lonzo Ball, who is a rookie for the Lakers. His father Lavar was a failed basketball player who decided to focus his sons’ upbringing around learning basketball. Lonzo is his eldest son and has shown an unusually high level of good decision making for such a young player. He has two younger sons as well, and if at least one of them also makes it to the NBA, that would be highly significant, since that represents the 450 best basketball players in the entire world and the Ball brothers don’t have the obvious genetic gifts of “being seven feet tall” that tend to confound these measurements.

Alternatively it could be a case of nominative determinism striking again!

The flip side of this is Todd Marinovich , who was groomed his entire life to be an NFL quarterback by an intensely competitive father.

This is all the realm of anecdote, or course. No one knows for certain where the balance is in raising your kids, and it’s probably different for every kid.

I super like the “and it’s probably different for every kid” approach, which a lot of these Polgar-type systems seem to miss. The trick is you have to be curious in a sustained way about who your particular kid is.

I do sort of wish all parents had to take some basic developmental psychology class so that they can at least potentially recognize where their needs end and their child’s needs begin (speaking as a therapist who has treated a lot of people raised by narcissistic parents).

so I’m not sure the cost-benefit analysis works out in favor of intensive education

I am surprised by how much push back the Polgar method is getting in the comments, and I guess this is the crux of my confusion.

What is supposed to be the ‘cost’ of the Polgar method.

Homeschooling is a cost, of sorts, I don’t actually know how the math works out on homeschooling versus traditional education, but I imagine it is more expensive. However if we imagine a family that is going to engage in some kind of homeschooling, what would they/their children lose by following the Polgar method instead of some other method?

It was my understand that traditional education was pretty much garbage(I know mine was, I learned more from magic cards than I ever learned in an English class). Even if they never became grand masters, it seems to me the Polgar sisters head to college at 18 dramatically better off than I did.

Edit: The one obvious ‘cost’ I can think of is everyone is just assuming that most people who try this will fail and just torture their kids by forcing them to do things they hate, which they also never really get good at. This feels a bit like cheating, but I guess I can see how the Polgar method might be more prone to operator error than more traditional education methods.

If your kid is spending three hours a day learning chess, they are not spending those three hours a day doing something else. It is very very possible that the thing they would otherwise be doing would be more important than chess. If you go with a fixed number of educational hours, it’s probably trading off against learning other subjects more deeply. If you expand educational hours, then it might be trading off against exercise (better health, longer lifespan), unstructured play (creativity, executive function), socializing with other people (social skills), sleep (mood, health, executive function, probably a dozen other things)…

In addition, some methods of homeschooling encourage lots of independent work on the part of the student, and many parents arrange for homeschool coops so they don’t do all the teaching. Polgar method makes it harder to do homeschool coops with parents who aren’t doing a similar parenting method, and is very intensive so you can’t teach your kid and cook dinner at the same time.

If your kid is spending three hours a day learning chess, they are not spending those three hours a day doing something else.

I think at least part of my confusion is that some people seem to think of the Polgar method as ‘force your kid to spend tons of hours on this’.

My initial impression, was that it was more about fascination hacking(moridinamael goes into this below). It seemed to me, from Scotts first post even, that the core of the method was, get your kid to love playing chess. In that context it is really hard for me to think of 3 hours a day of chess(something you love to do anyways) as trading off against anything worthwhile, especially given the staggering number of hours I spent playing World of Warcraft.

Edit: I guess a lot of this is wrapped up in my personal experience, I feel like I ‘wasted’ the vast majority of my time as a child, that anything more structured than, doodle for 8 hours a day go home and play video games, sleep, repeat, would have me dramatically better off than I am now.

Video games are not terribly useful for anything besides developing hand-eye coordination, but one assumes that parents who are content to allow their children to play video games for all their waking non-school hours are not going to adopt intensive make-your-child-a-chess-genius educational programs.

(I had a lovely childhood and my large amounts of unstructured outdoor play provided exactly the benefits the literature suggests. I would be somewhat cross if my parents had chosen to replace it with intensive chess education.)

This is extremely ignorant and someday you will probably be very embarrassed for having said it some day. Video games launched the careers of thousands of historians, linguists, anthropologists, classicists, and others. They also provided the impetus for hundreds to thousands of programmers. Strategy games inspired similar numbers of people into relevant fields like political science, diplomacy, the military, etc. The vast majority of video games don’t even require above average hand eye coordination. Sure if you just played Doom/Call of Duty/Halo/ LoL/Overwatch all day you only learn hand/eye coordination, but that’s not a majority of games.

Thanks for finding this. As the dad of a very bright 2-year old I think a lot about what I should be doing to develop her.

A question I have is: If not chess, then what?

I had a friend is school that was a multi-time US chess champion (he got destroyed internationally. At the time he said, “its like I was the best basketball player in Greece”). Before business school he had a business teaching kids chess. His arguement was it was a unique skill that helped kids learn to learn. Because it had such a quick direct feedback mechanism kids could see the value of learning. (Vs when you learn physics, how long before you really understand you’ve learned anything? Who is learning faster? Was the test even fair? Etc)

Chess (or at least non-random element games) has/have a lot of unique properties that say something like cooking does not.

If I eere to use his method to teach my daughter to be a genius, what skill should I choose? What is the realistic selection set? I really don’t think it’s “anything”

I don’t think it’s cooking

I could see how it might be math. But mag lacks that feedback mechanism that Chess has. I’ll bet poker would be better if you wanted her to learn probability.

Does there need to be a competitive element? It feels like it would st least help.

(If I look at the skills I picked up at a high level outside of school they were all competitive – I even did competitive lifeguarding and improv comedy. I can’t imagine getting to the level I got in life guarding if there weren’t competitions to test against)

What’s the competitive version of writing and communication? (Debate maybe? But is feedback cycle too long in that?)

Chess is also nice that it is competitive but not judged.

Would love others thoughts on this.

(We already have her in language (Spanish), music/singing and gymnastics. I guess I have 6 months to figure out her specialty…)

If you want to start raising a genius, you should choose a subject that is heavily based on pattern recognition. Chess, music and to a certain degree maths. These are the areas where prodigies regularly turn up.

In maths you have a tight feedback loop if you develop it mostly as problem solving using basic techniques. Of course knowing the technical stuff inside out doesn’t turn you into a great mathematician, but it’s definitely a big leg up.

If you are looking to cultivate general ability in some broad generally useful field, how about making her good with people? Being well-liked, persuasive, and good at organizing joint efforts is useful in pretty much any job or hobby.

In the earliest days, this would be done by enrolling her in lots of group-focused activities. Later on, it would mean looking for minor opportunities for leadership, such as patrol leader positions in the Scouts or Guides. Teenagers also sometimes participate in fund raising, which could be useful experience in salesmanship.

I was going to make this post, so I’m glad you did.

Programing seems like a good candidate, maybe? That said, while I don’t have kids, I do have a wife, and judging from us it seems very likely that our child’s core competency will be with the liberal arts and rhetoric. How do you do the single-focus-at-an-early-age thing with something like that, which to my view doesn’t really work without a broad knowledge base? Or maybe I’m wrong about that last part, and you can get there with sufficiently dog-earred copies of Symbolic Logic and Rhetoric ?

Math by far, imo. There are math competitions down the line and, as mentioned, the problem-solving element creates a mental reward. Getting someone to see math as a series of fun problems to be solved instead of as rote work and applications of formulas (comp to the steps Polgar walked before even starting full chess games with his daughters) is more naturally challenging than doing the same with chess, but still very achievable.

A brief argument in favor of math: 1) it’s beautiful and rewarding at near-mastery: you see many mathematicians in love with their subject in a way that doesn’t seem true about e.g. programming 2) it has many subfields and natural ties to other potential subjects and interests 3) a deep understanding of math is hugely beneficial for many academic and non-academic careers even at sub-prodigy level

I think that the approach could probably work for acting. I don’t have any presentable evidence for this – I suspect that the occasional outstanding child actors who do emerge in the world we actually live in are the product of natural talent not intensive training – but it’s a learnable skill that is for the most part incredibly poorly taught, leading to a career frequently entered into by people who are still very bad at it in which there is a considerable premium on already being good in one’s late teens or early twenties. I think given the time and dedication required, a reasonable actor (like me) would have an excellent chance of raising a brilliant one.

I’ve thought about that. I did a lot of improv comedy when I was younger – even wrote a book on it – and performed stand-up for a few years. A few weeks ago I did an open mike and brought her on stage with me. She told a simple (nonsense) knock-knock joke and brought down the house (knock knock. Who’s there. Gorilla. Gorilla who? [beats chest]).

What would you suggest on this route? Just games from Viola Spolin to start? Some local theatre classes for kids? (have her in music/singing classes already)

I live in Seattle, so I feel like it’s not the ideal LOCATION to make it in acting…

I don’t know anything about Viola Spolin specifically (improv being much less of a big thing this side of the Atlantic) but improv games certainly doesn’t sound like a bad start. I’d be a bit wary of local theatre classes for kids; I think a disturbing amount of approximate training for young people – including leading drama schools for aspiring professionals in their late teens or early 20s – has a tendency to make actors worse, not better, specifically in the sense of encouraging false, superficial, stagey performances. That might be less of a problem in the States than Britain, but I wouldn’t count on it. I also agree with those above that it’s likely the strong, persistent personal connection with the teacher is an important part of Polgar’s recipe.

Singing, dancing and playing common instruments (I would guess guitar>piano>violin in terms of usefulness) are certainly all useful ancillary skills that can make it easier to find employment (true triple threats are like hen’s teeth) but are less relevant to the screen work that’s by far the most realistic way to make a long term living than to stage. Definitely worth doing if it fits in the schedule, though.

An aspect of the skillset that I do think is easy to overlook is working with text. Making other people’s words – sometimes complicated passages of words – sound like they naturally belong to you is important and not always easy. I’m pretty sure this is a big part of the reason why the Dragon School keeps churning out actors in spite of minimal drama teaching or indeed expertise on staff (at least at the time any of them were there) – they have kids reading out loud, learning and reciting serious literature from an early age. I also think it’s telling that Chloe Moretz – one of those rare child stars who was actually good – first accessed acting by reading in lines to help her older brother when he was at stage school.

All that said, there definitely very much remains the question of whether you should . Even aside from Seattle not necessarily being the ideal location, it’s not an easy career to succeed in (and one in which being extremely good is less a guarantor of success than in chess or tennis or maths) and not one that has the best history of making people happy even if they do succeed. It’s set up almost perfectly to engender anxiety and rejection. The highs are very high, and I enjoy the structure of alternating periods of working very intensively with significant time off; I don’t regret my choice. But… I’d be wary of pressing it on someone else, especially someone I loved.

As the dad of a very bright 12-year old I suggest exposing your kid to lots of things and let her interests decide how you allocate your learning time with her. Since you kid will care a great deal about what you think of her, you can easily give her meaningful feedback. The feedback problem only arises when your child is interested in something and becomes better at it than you. But, kids under ten are not very smart compared to adults so you will likely find it easy to keep far ahead of her in whatever she finds interesting for a while. I wrote this LW post on memory games you can play with your kid. Working memory is so important for learning that I think it’s worth it to push/bribe your child to play games that increase working memory.

Thanks you.

You wrote that a couple of years ago. How has it gone since then?

Have you taught him memory palaces? That’s something I’ve always thought would be a valuable skill to pick up early and have for life.

We have been spending less time on memory games because he would rather be doing other types of learning which now is mostly computer programming and math. I have not taught him the memory palace approach. His working memory is still exceptional and he can remember symbols on a 5 by 5 grid and answer questions such as how would you move from the “T” to the “+”. He is doing exceptionally well at school and in September (although he will be only 12) he will be taking AP calculus BC and probably AP computer science (for which he took a placement test today). Both of his parents and three of his grandparents are/were college professors so it’s just possible that genetics plays a role in him being good at academic stuff.

I taught poetry to my younger brother starting at two. Kids’ rote memory is impressive and practice helps them keep that skill.

If you are really interested in attempting this then you need to choose something you already enjoy. Skimming parts of the book shows me that the subtext is heavily about the parent/child teacher/student relationship. Are you really going to instill a deep love of something in your children when you only have a passing interest? Even if you are just the secondary partner in this (ie you work and your spouse is a stay at home) you will be spending hundreds of hours a year with you child on this subject.

Music is mentioned a lot here, but mostly as a performer (learn an instrument). What about music production? Playing around with a DAW is pretty fun. You could make a feedback cycle by having your kid make a track periodically and then you review it. It usually only takes 3–5 years for adults to become competent, so the kid could already be making hits before they’re 10.

Drawing is fun if you’re good at it, and most kids enjoy it even when they’re just doing stick figures. But they don’t usually practice 3 hours a day. (The ones that do usually get a career out of it.)

Competitive video games are also an option. Most current professionals started playing their game at 12–15 years old. Having 10 years on the competition is pretty sure to give your kid a leg up. And the fun is already built in, so it’s not much work as teacher. (Of course, you might not want to expose your kid to something like CS:GO at 3 years old.) The biggest problem is finding a game that will still be around in 15 years.

Sofia is not a grandmaster, afaik. So two grandmasters and an international master. Or, alternatively: Two grandmasters and a woman grandmaster, which however is weaker than an international master.

Fun fact: None of the Polgar sisters is still playing.

Is it odd for them to not still be playing? According to Wikipedia they moved into coaching. I don’t know anything about competitive chess but that seems like a pretty standard career move for a middle-aged athlete.

35, plus or minus a few years, is the average “peak” for chess players. Kasparov retired before he was 42. Judit, the strongest sister, retired at age 38. That doesn’t seem particular shocking one way or the other.

Thanks. So it sounds like, it wasn’t the case that they burned out on chess super early or anything like that. They just… got old.

Retiring before you are 40 is definitely not terribly common. I’d say most world class players don’t retire at all. Of course many tone it down a lot, but these guys just love chess. It’s part of the charm of chess that you can meet the legends of the seventies in some international (or even local) open (at least in Europe).

Thanks to the magic of affirmative action, she is officially a Woman Grandmaster .

That’s not really affirmative action. That’s a separate category for women, which has been common in competitive sports probably since women began playing them. Seems a little odd in chess where any advantage men has is not obviously visible, but it fits that pattern better than affirmative action. If it was affirmative action, she’d be simply called _Grandmaster_ (despite passing a lower bar) and it would be against the rules to treat her any differently than any Grandmaster who met the higher bar.

It doesn’t seem that odd in Chess. As we’ve seen linked from a links post on this very blog, factors that have small impacts on the population mean will cause very notable disparate representation when you’re very far from the mean. I would expect that there are at least small social prejudices against women pursuing a mastery of chess, so I’m not surprised to hear that the number of women who clear the (male) bar for grandmaster is notably lower (and hence that a separate bar would be created).

That’s a separate category for women, which has been common in competitive sports probably since women began playing them.

I don’t think I agree with it, but the position that all such things are affirmative action is at least defensible at first glance.

Women can also be (regular) grandmasters, as indeed her two sisters are. As someone fairly familiar with chess—I follow the world chess championship and I’ll disclose my lichess username to you privately if you’d like to check that I play actively—I would say that saying GM when you mean WGM is not done in chess circles, and is at best misleading.

I would recommend “three masters—including two grandmasters” or, as another commenter suggested, “two grandmasters and an international master”.

“Surely there are schools that try to make children love learning and feel a sense of accomplishment in their work (don’t be snarky here, I’m as depressed as anyone by the education system but there are so many different private schools with wacky philosophies that I’m sure at least one of them has hit the target). But none of them have all their students grow up to be world-class chess grandmasters or the interdisciplinary equivalent. Why not?”

You basically need to let the kid set the pace of their own learning for 10+ years — how many schools are truly willing to do that? No private or public school in my pop-1m city would come close to that. It’s just not how they process their mission statement (“teach kids x in y years so they can move on to z”); even gifted schools and classes will just have more ambitious values of x, y, and z. This rules out 99.9+% of schools no matter how much they try to make kids love learning, and then the remaining handful are still operating under the constraints of economics, the need to have a plan that they can sell to more than one parent, and the talent pool both of students and of teachers.

I’m sure a variation of Polgar’s philosophy has been used many times to raise extremely successful children, just through a homeschool setup. The parents didn’t aim to or care about replicability, and an Ivy math Ph.D is less marketable than a child chess prodigy.

My experience is that simply “don’t hold back your most gifted students” would increase any school’s chances of turning out a genius-level specialist by an order of magnitude+. Anecdotally: as I’m sure is true for a lot of commenters, I was in top classes in local schools through high school. For reasons more logistical than philosophical, I was given a textbook and free rein in math for 1.5 years of middle school. I’d estimate I learned 5x faster with this setup — with minimal oversight, and no “sense of play” or world-class teacher, just some professor the school paid to show up once every two weeks for an hour — than in traditional high-level classes.

Yeah, I had a similar experience growing up, and I wonder if much of this genuinely is just “start with bright kids, don’t get in their way, encourage them to do something incredible, and find a way to make it fun.” Those last two were huge for me, even after the initial gains from being left alone, but I’m not sure it would have been the same if someone had tried to make a whole school do it.

I saw a story recently with a headline like “ man hits his head in diving accident; becomes musical genius .”

What… struck me about this story, though I don’t know how legit it is and haven’t looked into it carefully, is that, when interviewed, the man said he felt an obsessive need to play the piano ever since the accident.

In other words, the headline makes it sound like “blow to head instills musical ability.” If the man is correct, however, what the blow to the head instilled was not musical ability per se, but an obsessive need to cultivate it.

And this is why I always think motivation and interest is so important. No one becomes great at music without practice, but that doesn’t mean everyone who practices a lot will become great at music; more importantly, the desire to practice music a lot varies widely. If you decide to obsessively focus on facilitating your children’s tennis career and they happen to also have a strong motivation to play tennis (which they will probably have at a rate greater than chance, assuming you are their genetic parent), then they may, in fact, become great tennis players.

But if you take a child not intrinsically interested in tennis and stick him a tennis-obsessed household, they will probably end up rolling their eyes about tennis at best, deeply resentful of their pushy parents at worst.

Or perhaps, like Andre Agassi among others, incredibly good at tennis but psychologically messed up and deeply resentful about it.

I thought you were referring to Tony Cicoria who was struck by lightning and supposedly developed a talent for playing the piano. Anyways as someone who listens to a lot of piano music and plays it myself (though not professional level) I would say that they are good but not great. I’ve met more talented people in composition classes in college. Compulsion is part of talent certainly, but it is not all of talent. Some people really do learn more quickly, develop better intuitions, show more creativity etc. with the same amount of effort as normal folk.

Or there is Radiolab’s latest episode about a guy who starts playing piano obsessively after his fourth brain surgery. Unfortunately also correlated with disinhibitory behaviors like overeating and hypersexuality, which confused me. Playing the piano for 8+ hours per day would seem like something that takes disclipine?

Things only take discipline if you don’t want to do them.

Man in NYC asks a friendly cabbie “Hey, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?”

The cabbie shoots back “Practice!”

I had chills the entire read because, despite all the talk of ‘the children should enjoy learning’, this all reminds me of my narcissist father’s botched, abusive, and isolationist K-12 homeschooling of myself and my brother.

“If the instruction is good, one has no need of giving grades.” Of course! The better to obscure their academic failures from observers! This was one of my dad’s tactics, and it all ended with me at a 8th grade level on most subjects at the age of 20.

At least he wasn’t obsessed with grooming us for chess (his hyper-focus was reading in general), but still, we came out barely functional. Homeschooling can be great when it’s not performed by narcissists and/or religious fanatics; otherwise, it produces academically and emotionally stunted victims. That’s the vibe I get here; I’ll be pleasantly surprised if I learn that none of Polgar’s daughters experienced mental anguish as adults, but Polgar apparently doesn’t give them a voice here at all, because that would diminish his spotlight.

Screw raising a genius. I want my future kid to be able to get by in the world, and to not hate themselves deep into their 20s.

I’d really like to hear more details on what went wrong for you, if you don’t mind sharing them.

I participate a lot in /r/raisedbynarcissists and recommend it. I’ve posted there a lot about what I went through, but in general, a lot of these abuse patterns are surprisingly common. I’m shocked there aren’t far more homeschooling stories there.

Someday, I’d like to write a dos/don’ts guide to homeschooling based on my experiences, but probably won’t be able to do it justice until I’m raising (homeschooling?) my own kid.

I appreciate that you can separate your experiences from homeschooling-at-large. I, for one, would be interested in your thoughts on dos-and-don’ts for homeschooling.

Homeschooling is the province of weirdos. I am constantly reminded that we’re strange for choosing to school our kids within our own four walls. It can make one defensive.

I second rminnema. I think your homeschooling experience is worth telling, to the extent you are interested in doing that.

We’re homeschoolers as well. I get that homeschooling is already often viewed as something undertaken by a bunch of crazies, so that would be fueled by stories of people homeschooled by parents who have untreated mental illness. But it’s worth saying that if your parents have mental health problems, then having no escape from them into school or other adult influences could be that much more harmful to a child.

I read a ton of stuff about homeschooling when we first started down this road almost a decade ago, and I don’t recall reading anything about social and psychological factors that might encourage better or worse outcomes for kids. Though I feel like I could have some opinions about that now.

Polgar’s daughters have all been interviewed and say they’re really happy and loved their childhoods. A lot of journalists have investigated and it seems true.

Thanks for the follow-up. That’s a relief, but I have two concerns:

1) Many abuse survivors, especially from previous generations where abuse was normalized, remain in denial or never find the vocabulary to object to how they were treated. Assuming that’s not the case,

2) I could still see this material being exploited by abusive parents who latch onto the idea of raising ‘geniuses’. Then again, that’s already a widespread problem in homeschooling, and we still haven’t figured out how to protect the majority of kids from abusive parents even outside of homeschooling, so this looks more and more like just another brick in the wall.

In general I think we should default to taking them at their word before going down the “maybe they’re just in denial about being victims- make them victims!” road.

But your 2nd point is a good one- unfortunately one that’s perhaps vulnerable to being universalized as an objection to nearly anything. My parents gave me books to read, and I enjoyed it and quite thoroughly benefited from high literacy later. But it sounds as though someone like your father could stretch even something as banal as that into motivation-for-abuse.

In general I think we should default to taking them at their word before going down the “maybe they’re just in denial about being victims- make them victims!” road.

Daring to have reservations is not anywhere close to that road. And she bent over backwards to put off exactly that aggressive misinterpretation by explicitly disavowing it. Have some respect.

Polgar seems like a guy who can make learning fun. Someone trying to implement this without this skill could make for a hellish childhood. Andre Agassi famously hated his tennis obsessed childhood, while Monica Seles loved hers. The difference was their dads’ skills at making things fun were so wildly different.

Yeah, this reminds me of the Tiger Mother, who got her kids playing instruments at high levels plus into Ivy League schools, but they seem pretty unhappy, and the younger and more talented daughter hates the violin so much she gives it up as soon as she’s an adult. I’m not opposed to my kids being geniuses, but not at the price of their happiness.

I havent seen any mention of the story of The Shaggs here. They were a family of young girls pulled out of mainstream schools to practice music every day because their father was convinced they would become a famous pop band. Obsessive practice on its own is definitely not enough to achieve anything. For one thing the father had no musical training or talent of his own, so had to hire music teachers. The girls never seem to have become engaged with the process, always understanding themselves to be mediocre musicians.

“If the instruction is good, one has no need of giving grades.” Of course! The better to obscure their academic failures from observers!

I find it ironic that where I live, the idea “perhaps grades are obsolete, who needs feedback anyway?” is typically expressed by parents who have their children at schools. I guess that banning grades would finally make schools the perfect babysitting institutions with no downside.

On the other hand, I would love to see exams decoupled from teaching; preferably done by a different institution. Because then, no matter how specifically the children were educated, they would be graded the same way (which also means we could compare the efficiency of different types of education; perhaps if we control for IQ and some other things). But even in absence of this, whoever believes they are raising geniuses, can send them to various competitions. For example, if my kids will do well at math, I will definitely tell them to do math olympiad.

I’ll be pleasantly surprised if I learn that none of Polgar’s daughters experienced mental anguish as adults

You have an experience of being abused by homeschooling. I know people who were abused by the school system (actually I was also bullied for a few months). In theory, at school there are more people who can intervene. In practice, they often don’t.

Because then, no matter how specifically the children were educated, they would be graded the same way

Even outside the worst-case “teach to the test” failure modes, this locks you into a specific order of topics – if the exams for Nth grade cover US history and geometry, and the ones for N+1th grade cover European history and algebra, people who learn these in different years are not going to do as well.

Quick formatting notes, a lot of the quoted text seems to have weird returns or spaces in it, from copy pasting out of the PDF I assume, and there’s a missing html quote tag entirely for the end goal.

I’d like to again push my theory:

A lot of parents in the 20th Century home-schooled their children with some kind of goal of doing education better, academically, than the school system. (That is, I’m excluding here people who home-schooled their children for moral lessons or whatever: just talking about people who felt that they could do better at traditional schooling goals than their school system). And then there were many more parents in the 20th Century that did some other kind of alternative to “send their kids to the local school,” that wasn’t homeschooling.

One guy ended up with three internationally-accomplished chess players. A million other people did not. What is our basis for believing that this was anything other than chance and survivorship bias?

Polgar should probably be compared not with the average homeschooling parent but with the average homeschooling parent of a genius. He probably did better than chance because he raised three geniuses, not just one.

If I flip a coin ten times in a row and it comes up heads every time, that’s pretty unlikely. It’s not particularly unlikely in the context of 1,000 other people flipping coins and not coming up with heads every time.

I haven’t seen anyone even attempt to quantify how unlikely it is to have three daughters who were internationally ranked in chess, nor how large the group is that we’re implicitly looking at; there’s just a lot of “oh, this must be signal, not noise.”

Humans are notoriously bad at this. They see random noise and create signal out of it. Where is the rigorous attempt to overcome bias here?

Only there is no binary good/not good for chess. His daughters include the best woman player of all time and the only woman ever to qualify for a World Championship tournament, this isn’t just crossing some minimum threshold like flipping a coin.

He said he was going to do it beforehand (he courted his wife by looking for someone who was interested in helping him try his genius-raising technique) and he did it 3/3 times.

Look, let’s say that each of those daughters was in the top 1% by pure random ability to play chess (over and above whatever IQ you’d expect them to gain from expected heredity and from the amount of time they spent training on it). That doesn’t sound crazy to me. Like one person in 100 could become a grandmaster (or grandmaster-lite) if they’re basically high-IQ and train monomanically from birth. At that point, this family is a one-in-a-million outlier. There were thousands of one-in-a-million outlier families over the course of the 20th Century. The reason you have this book and not one of the several thousand other books from one-in-a-million outlier families is that only 0.x% percent of outlier families had some particular kind of crazy theory about how their essentially random success was a result of their hard work.

So a called shot is more impressive than an uncalled one, and three called shots even more so. It avoids the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy (calling whatever you hit the ‘target’).

The reason you have this book and not one of the several thousand other books from one-in-a-million outlier families is that only 0.x% percent of outlier families had some particular kind of crazy theory about how their essentially random success was a result of their hard work.

That’s _exactly_ what Polgar’s pre-commitment avoids.

It absolutely does not avoid that problem, unless you accept the premise that if Polgar had raised three kind of decent Master-level daughters, you’d ever have heard his name. Which you clearly would not have .

Look, there are tons of very simple stories that explain this result:

1. Chess, as it turns out, is a game that responds extremely well to very early childhood training.

2. Polgar and his wife had some kind of genetic combination which led to impressive chess performance per se with decently high probability.

3. Polgar just happened to have three very smart daughters who would have excelled regardless of their educational regime.

4. Some combination of the above.

All of these stories are clearly far more plausible than the idea that Polgar is a Solar Exalt with a Training Charm (read: “than that Polgar has the supernatural ability to create geniuses”). All you have to do is be a little less impressed that he was trying to do something like this.

Polgar lived in a time and place replete with people making educational experiments. There are a huge wealth of people out there calling shots and failing, and you just don’t hear about them. The human species is enormously big. This is just survivorship bias. The fact that he called his shot, sure, adds a few orders of magnitude to the size of the population that needs to be culled before you see some survivors, but the size of that population is 10^9 or 10^10. It’s plenty big to handle that.

I agree that there are alternate explanations, but luck isn’t a good one. There aren’t anything like 10^9 total humans who ever lived, let alone childhood educational experiments.

I’m sorry if this comes off as snarky, but I’m surprised by how confident you are in your made up numbers. Are you aware that there have only been about 40 female grandmasters ever? Do you have any idea how often siblings both achieve the grandmaster title? (almost never)

In any case, I think it’s hard to deny that for a large number of skills, an intense training during childhood will produce much greater success than having that child try to pick up those skills as an adult – it will not take an average person and make them world renowned – but it will take them to a much higher level. These skills include language (most anyone can learn 4 languages if you start early enough), music performance (the story of most child prodigies was having a Tiger mother or father), chess, and I suspect programming will become one as well. Skills that I doubt fall into this category include science (because of the lack of a clear endpoint and the need for luck/connections), writing (lack of a clear goal), politics (too much luck dependence on luck and connections). But those are just a guess.

I think programming will not. It’s just not complex enough to require that kind of dedication.

@TheNybbler

Er, 10^9 is 1 billion.

Do you know how many female children have been trained since age 3 3+ hours a day every day?

Err, sorry, miscounted my exponents. But there haven’t been 1 billion weird childhood education experiments either (that would be something like 1 in 110 children, for all time). There are a lot of children who were trained 3+ hours a day, if you could call it that. But in “production line” facilities for general or elite educational purposes, not to make them into chess grandmasters.

I agree, there are not 10^9 weird childhood educational experiments. But there are 10^9 families, just in the 20th Century, and that’s ultimately the population that matters. Our attention gets drawn to highly unusual families, and then we go and look for what makes them highly unusual.

If it wasn’t “I decided to raise chess players,” then it could plausibly be something else, and we’d be debating the merits not of this particular pedagogy, but this particular diet, or this particular approach to assortative mating, or, you know, some other pedagogy, or, as Scott tried to do before Polgar, the merits of this region of this country. Or whatever. And we don’t see the various people who have similar pedagogies or diets or mating strategies or unusual regions they come from or blah-blah-blah that don’t end up with one in a million or one in a billion families.

We just shouldn’t be too impressed that Polgar said, “I decided to make my daughters good at chess,” and then trained them extensively at chess, and they were good at chess. If he said, “I decided to make my daughters good at chess” and then trained them extensively at chess, and then they were incredible polymaths that were great at fields that we have much more interest in, and which far, far, far more people have trained extensively in, that would be more interesting.

Like, the worst of all worlds for Polgar is that his method kinda sorta works for chess in particular, but his daughters were like 1:10 or 1:20 outliers in its efficacy for whatever reason. At that point his family is only 1:1000 or 1:8000, and we have a pedagogy that mostly doesn’t work for chess and doesn’t work at all for anything else, and which requires 10 years of constant training to determine the success of.

He raised three very high performing female Chess players. If their performance at Chess was simply an epiphenomena of their incredible intelligence that would be one thing, but their bios are devoid of any significant achievements unrelated to Chess. Laszlo’s claim that ‘geniuses are made, not born’ is certainly not borne out with his offspring. Great competitors are made, not just born – but everyone already knew that was true to some extent, great competitors are shaped by their trainers and their training regime.

You don’t know how many fellas try to spring this on their kids. Saying you’re gonna do some experiment beforehand is valuable in large part so people can see failure rate by looking at all the people who say they are going to do x thing and counting the successes and failures. If those pre-announcements are completely muted for failures (you never hear about some guy saying ‘I know how to make the smartest kids ever’ if there are no spectacular results) then the most important thing about calling a shot and then making it is fundamentally gone.

This is nothing like a way to raise ‘geniuses.’ Even in its properly stated extremely narrow scope it is very failure prone, impossible if you don’t have the right heredity, and not remotely worth the tremendous effort unless you and your children find it fun. Getting lucky three times is not impossible. I’m not saying this sort of regime does not hugely enrich your children’s competitive chances – it likely increases them many fold – I’m saying I wouldn’t be at all surprised if his chances of going 3/3 even in the limited way he did were low. I’d guess even one boy would screw up the ‘perfect’ record, because that boy would face much tougher competition to earn any worthwhile acclaim.

You don’t know how many fellas try to spring this on their kids.

But we can put a reasonable upper bound by assuming that anyone who is going to develop and test a Super Genius Baby Recipe on their own kids is going to have to A: home-school them and B: have a scientific background at roughly the Ph.D. level. Those aren’t strictly and absolutely requirements; it’s possible that someone with an MS in psychology has come up with what they think is a Super Genius Baby Recipe compatible with spending eight hours per day in public schools, but those cases are presumably more than balanced by the Ph.D. homeschoolers who aren’t testing Super Genius Baby Recipes.

Applying statistics from here and here , with a bit of supplemental data from around the web, I estimate that about 30,000 households with at least one Ph.D. or equivalent parent have homeschooled their children to adulthood in Europe and the Anglosphere since 1945. That, I think, is a conservative upper bound for the number of people who have attempted to privately implement Super Genius Baby Recipes any place we would expect to have heard of at least the successes.

Judging by the FIDE ratings , even the weakest of the Polgar sisters is in the top 0.005% of the field in her predesignated area of excellence. Judit is pretty much off the charts, top 0.0005% and having achieved that at an unprecedented age. Not just a genius in her chosen field, but a literally superlative human(*) being. Crudely speaking, the odds of getting results equal to the Polgar sisters by chance are one in 340 trillion.

But that’s not fair. We are by definition talking about a deliberate attempt to cultivate excellence in one specific field; let’s throw out 99% of FIDE-rated players as dilettantes who could have simply tried harder and shouldn’t be counted in the comparison. And let’s attribute 50% of the Polgar sisters’ exceptionalism to their shared Hungarian Jewish Mad Scientist DNA. My statistics texts are in the other office, but BOTE I still get that as one in 18,000.

So, of all the people who could plausibly have attempted Laszlo Polgar’s hat trick, we would expect one or two to have succeeded. And Laszlo is the one who called his shots ahead of time. Perhaps not a proven fact by P<0.05 or whatever other standard you'd prefer, but it certainly looks like something worth paying attention to.

* Or maybe Abomination of Mad Science, but it's mad social science with no DNA tinkering and we’re open-minded and tolerant sorts here.

You think that 1 in 100 FIDE-rated players were trained multiple hours a day every day since literally before they could remember? That seems high to me. There are half a million FIDE-rated players. 5,000 people who were trained monomanically throughout their lives seems like a lot. 500 seems like a lot, but perhaps within the realm of reason.

We might also reasonably believe that if one of the Polgar sisters had some biological predilection for chess success beyond the baseline for what we’d expect a reasonably smart person to, the other two children having it are not independent odds. They have, after all, 50% of each other’s DNA, and presumably similar prenatal environments.

1% of FIDE players is a set of 4000 or so, almost all of them professionals or very dedicated amateurs. Several hours per day since they decided chess was their thing, probably some time well before adulthood, seems likely to me.

That it has to begin literally before one can remember is part of the Polgar recipe being tested. Only a part, and not every proposed recipe for genius includes that element.

I’m sorry, I’m not quite sure what to take from the reddit post you linked. ‘Chess.com’ ratings aren’t FIDE as far as I know.

https://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=700231 https://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=700088 https://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=700070

Best of the sisters is top .0004% (assuming 170,000 rated players) Worst is top 1%. I don’t think you can just take peak rating without putting in quite a bit of effort determining how much churn there is – how many people at one point got to x percentile is gonna be much higher than x percentile percent.

I think you might be massively overestimating the number of people who put full time hours into Chess.

Several hours per day since they decided chess was their thing, probably some time well before adulthood, seems likely to me.

I would be very surprised if on avg they spent 48hrs a week on Chess during their childhoods, and when you’re an adult with a job, well, you can’t typically put in full time hours. I don’t think the number of people who can actually make a living with pro Chess is that high… The Polgar sisters spent an unusual amount of time, and this matters.

Worth paying attention to, I would agree. I just don’t like the ‘How to raise a genius’ framing, or his notion that geniuses are raised not born. These particular very highly performing Chess players were certainly raised, not born, and that’s cool. I think children are generally underestimated and it’s a good idea to get them started on a useful skill quickly, and this bolsters that idea.

Einstein, Pauli, Bohr etc obviously weren’t ‘raised rather than born’ to become great physicists in anything remotely like the way these girls were raised to become great Chess players, and I think it is very clear that you could never raise such people – because unlike with Chess you don’t yet know what the crucial narrowly-defined problem spaces they’ll be working in are. You can’t ‘raise rather than birth’ Lewis and Clark by making them study maps of their voyage, because if you had these maps the voyage wouldn’t be special in the same way. What we most commonly call ‘genius’ is the incredible taming and mastery of novel problem spaces and problems.

Now if we have some open problem space which is important and has resisted attempts to usefully deal with it, and the situation will likely be very similar in a decade or so, then this sort of child ‘genius’ training program seems very promising indeed. But.. problem spaces that are really important and open, that won’t be substantially dealt with or altered with a decade or so of effort are rare as far as I know.

Anyway. If this Laszlo guy’s only point was – give kids way more credit, throw them at problems early, have fun with it, then I give four thumbs+big toes up. I don’t like the ‘nurturist’ angle of it, that’s my issue. This doesn’t show ‘geniuses are raised, not born,’ not at all, not remotely.

I think you might be massively overestimating the number of people who put full time hours into Chess. […] I would be very surprised if on avg they [top 1% of rated players] spent 48hrs a week on Chess during their childhoods, and when you’re an adult with a job, well, you can’t typically put in full time hours.

Top 1% of FIDE-rated players comes to roughly 4000 people. If Quora is right, there are between 3000 and 10000 people whose job is chess. Those people, and some of the most dedicated amateurs, I am fairly confident are putting in 40+ hours per week either playing or studying chess and I would wager that most of them started on that path before they graduated high school.

This is, to the first order, a body of people whom we can reasonably expect to have made themselves as good at playing chess as they can by the usual methods, and so compare any particular unusual method that might be proposed. In that sense it is fortunate that the Polgars chose chess rather than e.g. rocket science or brain surgery, as there is a reasonably quantifiable metric for chess performance.

If Quora is right, there are between 3000 and 10000 people whose job is chess. Those people, and some of the most dedicated amateurs, I am fairly confident are putting in 40+ hours per week

Mmmm, this is wiggly-woggly stuff. Having Chess as your full time job for years is a very different thing than ‘going pro’ very briefly.. I’m not big into the Chess scene but in the esports world you have a lot of people who basically go big trying to succeed as ‘pros,’ and they are ‘pros’ it is their job, but they burn out within a couple years because while they might be really good they aren’t making the kind of money they need to make… And below the top things are very, very meager.

People like the Polgar sisters who can dedicate so many hours so consistently, for years, being supported in this path… That’s gotta be an incredibly rare thing.

https://www.chess.com/article/view/making-money-in-chess

$10 mln/year – no one Over $1 mln/year – top-3 in the world Over $200k – top-10 Over $100k – top-50 Players close to the bottom of the top-100 are very unlikely to earn over $100k, for most the figure would be about $50-70k.

This is similar to the esports I follow… Look, there’s no way there are “between 3000 and 10000 people whose job is chess” in the sense that they can put in 48hrs a week for years and years undistracted, not having to give up or have another job alongside. A few hundred is probably stretching it. A situation like the Polgars is unbelievably amazing, just being able to practice 48hrs+ a week for years with full support and encouragement..! You don’t understand what that means if you think that’s not an amazing advantage.

There are lots of people who throw themselves into some competitive thing and do crazy hours for a little while. Many many people can do it for a little while, maybe even a year or two, that kind of thing. Very very very few can just have that be their thing unmolested. At any age. ‘Mom, instead of going to school can I just study and play Chess?’ Not gonna fly.

In that sense it is fortunate that the Polgars chose chess rather than e.g. rocket science or brain surgery, as there is a reasonably quantifiable metric for chess performance.

I mean, I’m actually super down with getting kids from promising backgrounds into subjects like that on a practical level really early. I think you’d get good results, more time more learning more practice is great. I just don’t think it means you have a ‘genius factory.’ You have a way to – by paying a very high price in time and effort – make someone a lot better at specifically x, y, or z. You’re not improving their general intelligence one bit, you’re improving their performance at a very particular task.

Really the main point in my mind isn’t that this is a great way to raise kids, but this is a great way to use kids. There isn’t a need to waste the first 18 years not accomplishing anything, if the kids have potential that potential can be used, and for more serious things than Chess competitions.

A lot of homeschoolers actually are brilliant though. Either just high achieving or unusually creative or boundary-breaking. Wasn’t Zuckerberg homeschooled?

Yes, but this is a selection issue as public schooling often doesn’t work well for brilliant children.

I think we should be more precise about what we want to improve in our educational system. As you alluded to in the end, there are a bunch of private schools out there who are doing good things. Believe it or not, some of them have results over the course of many years that suggest they even know what they’re doing. This is all going to come off as arrogant on my part, so sorry in advance. I am fascinated by education, but am no expert, have raised no kids, much less prodigies, and am probably a little naive because education worked out really well for me. I will avoid saying things generally, and but I can tell you about where I went to high school.

Did you know that John Hamm, Danny Meyer, and Sam Altman all went to the same St. Louis high school of < 100 kids per class? I went to the same high school and can tell you that even beyond the crazy outliers I just mentioned, there are a lot of alums who have done very well for themselves but you've never heard of. The students there all had a huge leg up on life through family money and connections, but the results are still exceptional. It cost a lot of money, which makes is really hard to normalize the results for social status. Of note is that a huge percentage of the students were on financial aid while I was there, which solves some of the problem of wealth, but there's still a big selection bias. It's also worth noting that a fair number of these kids came to the school in 7th grade from very average public schools (I did).

I won't go into what exactly the education was like there, but I will say that the school was 7-12 (US grades) and it was definitely a liberal arts education. It was definitely a very broad education, but there were outlets for students to specialize to a limited extent.

My big takeaway from my (admittedly extremely statistically small) experience was that it isn't a complete mystery as to how you should educate the students who excel in primary school. When people talk about how improving education is a hard problem I think they are usually talking about how to improve the educational outcomes for the bottom x% where x < 95. It seems like we have found some pretty good secondary education methods for the kids that primary education has shown us are exceptional. Identifying the top 1-x% isn't trivial and our current system has big blind spots but I think we're already better at that than we are at educating the bottom 25%.

Separately, if your goal is to place your child in the highest echelon of an established sport where an exorbitant amount of attention has been focused and the rules have been established for a long time (be that a thinking sport such as chess or go, or a physical sport such as basketball), they you're probably going to need to focus on that exclusively from a very early age, have some really good genes yourself, and get a little lucky in the genetic lottery. I would suggest that you are probably setting too narrow a goal for your child.

Humorously, Polgar's education system is self defeating if we taught every child intensive chess (or even a mix of 100 different similar games). It is mathematically impossible for every child to be in the top 1% of their sport! What are we going to do with all the excess chess players? While chess might be more applicable to other pursuit than baseball, there's a fair amount of evidence that the skills aren't all that transferable.

To his credit, training kids to become self teachers and love learning, if not exactly a breakthrough, strikes me a really important advice.

To the extent that the question we are really trying to answer is "how do we form primary education in a way that more students are ready for the secondary educations that have demonstrated effectiveness?", a story about raising chess experts by teaching them chess from a very early age is really useless. I am much more interested to hear from someone who's three kids went on to be great engineers, entrepreneurs, or even salespeople. It seems like there is probably more to be gained on a wider scale by improving those professions than improving our understanding of chess.

When you first talked about Laszlo Polgar on here, I assumed he was long gone. However, I now realize that he is still alive, which suggest a pretty obvious to gain more information about his educational theories and methods : ask him directly !

I feel like this is just a mix of common sense and non-generalizable.

Common sense: if you have a smart kid and you train them intensely at a specific subject for hours every day from a young age, they will become good at it. Of course they will! But it’s usually not so simple because…

Non-generalizable: Most kids can’t focus like that on one subject for so long, and most adults aren’t able to teach them to a high level. It worked here because chess is a game, so it’s fun for kids, but with a clear system of steadily progressing. There’s no physical component so they can play evenly against adults, no outside knowledge needed so they don’t need to study anything else, and their dad was fully capable of teaching them everything they needed to know. The pro chess system gives them an objective way to see their improvement and a lot of motivation (money, fame, praise) to keep improving. It’s well developed enough that they can easily find strong opponents and win prizes, but also niche enough that there weren’t many (any?) other kids doing the same thing, especially in women’s chess.

What if he had tried to make them into, say, the ultimate surgeon instead? That would be much more useful for society than a chess grandmaster. Unfortunately it’s not so straightforward. You can’t just “practice surgery”, you have to learn all the background knowledge (biology, chemistry, physics, anatomy, etc) first. You need to either observe live surgery or get cadavers to practice on, pretty much impossible until you’re accepted into a medical school. No one will let you perform a surgery until you’ve gone through a bunch of training and certifications first, so you have to keep this long-term abstract goal in you head while you do years of training. There isn’t much in the way of competitions or prizes for “best young biology student” so you have to motivate yourself internally. And finally, even if you do succeed in your goal, there’s no objective ranking system so you’d never be able to prove to anyone that you’re “the best”.

I guess you could just make a kid play “Operation” over and over but somehow I don’t think that would work.

You need to either observe live surgery or get cadavers to practice on, pretty much impossible until you’re accepted into a medical school.

Apropos. Our middle school biology teacher got us animal hearts (cow, if I recall correctly) from the local butchery that we proceeded to cut into pieces in a particularly memorable biology class. Also some smaller dead animals (I think they were some small birds? I can’t remember where they came from, maybe the same place as the hearts, but I do remember that my partner decided to have a sudden toilet break when I loudly exclaimed loudly that I had managed to find the optic nerve of the critter we were dissecting.)

However, surprisingly few of the students were disgusted compared to ones who were fascinated. I thought these kind of demos are relatively common. (Boring, regular municipal school in Finland, late 00s.)

I had frog dissection in what was probably high school. Junior high seems possible.

Yeah that’s true. Most American biology classes do that too. I guess you could learn some basic surgery skills that way. But I still think making the jump to practicing on a living human would be quite tough.

I mean I’m not confident as to how applicable this is to real surgery, but you can dissect / vivisect fly larvae ( maggots ) pretty much the same way as you can with any other organism. As far as I’m aware there aren’t any regulations on this.

If you wanted to build up the motor skills of a surgeon, cutting up insects is a cheap pastime which a lot of kids enjoy doing anyway but still takes very fine manipulations to do properly. You can make a dissection plate and pins yourself, the tweezers and micro-scissors are relatively cheap, and the dissection scope can get more use as they get older and graduate to rodents.

You can speculate about pushing the boundaries, but we don’t take advantage of the basics that we know about today. We know (search for “western”) how to turn a medical student into the best hernia surgeon in the world, in just a year, but most hernia surgeries are performed by inferior generalists with a decade of training. Probably it would be better to have specialists for many other kinds of surgeries.

There are objective rankings for surgeries: time in OR, recovery time, adverse events. If you do 750 of the same surgery each year, these numbers are statistically meaningful.

(On the other hand, ER surgeons have to be generalists. Gawande has another essay about how the C-section is popular because it can be taught to generalists, even though specialists can do a better job with other methods.)

My immediate thought would be to start with stuffed animals and dinner meats. Prepping for an operation could be a dinner activity; you can use condiments as stand-ins for… surgery things… and get the kid to memorize the names and process order. You could get anatomy pictures and use them as mazes. They could have clear goals to make incisions of exact lengths and depths in certain timeframes.

…I think the training and certification requirements are a civilized world thing; I bet you could find some terrible place that would let an untested child practice surgery.

When I was homeschooled we dissected fish eyeballs and chicken giblets. That stuff is readily available at the store. For the more advanced, you can order preserved fetal pigs. But that’s very different from human surgery, still, and what if you actually do become an expert surgeon at 12? They’re still not going to let you operate on living humans!

There’s also the simple fact that there is an instructional pipeline for surgeons, and you can’t really get around it. But I suppose you could hurry things along a bit.

Suppose you start in school at the regular age, grade 1 at age 6. You do really well and are allowed to skip two grades, meaning you start college at age 16 rather than the usual 18. Between AP credits and summer school, you finish your undergraduate studies in two years and start med school at 18. I’ve never heard of anyone moving through med school at anything other than the standard rate, so you take the same four years everyone else does, meaning you start your surgical residency at 22. The shortest surgical residencies take five years, so you could be a fully trained surgeon at 27.

You’ve written before about “winning the lottery of fascinations”. It seems to me, just from reading these snippets, that Polgar is primarily interested in rigging that lottery. Everything he’s doing is aimed at that goal specifically , even at the cost of what most would consider the primary attributes of an “education”.

* He would rather go through the material at a painfully slow rate than risk boring or overloading the child. * He would rather let the child win/succeed almost all the time than take the slightest risk that they might lose and consequently start fearing failure. (Do you know how hard it is to let a toddler beat you at anything nine times in a row?) * He would rather completely eschew anything that feels at all like “work” so the child can perpetually think of their studies as play, and this means almost every activity has to be carefully engineered to hit the exact right spot on the difficulty curve. No grinding through the chess equivalent of multiplication tables for the Polgar sisters. * He explicit builds into his system a social reward structure, making innate human social wiring work for him. Now the child wants to excel and grow because on some level it serves her social standing to do so, not just in the eyes of her parents, but also she seeks the esteem of her professional peers.

There’s a lot of bits of information there. At the risk of repeating myself, he’s making choices that are at the direct expense of what traditional educational paradigm requires. This slow, fun, social approach to learning is anathema to the need to just “get through the material” that is imposed by any typical program and even most atypical programs.

And I don’t think any hippy private school does the things in that list. I mean, trust me, I tried to find one. Nearly the best you’re gonna get is a private school that tries “crazy” things like not assigning ball-numbing homework sets and maybe letting teenagers start school later than 6:45 AM. If anybody is aware of a private school that takes a similar approach toward first-and-foremost engineering a kid’s fascination lottery, please let me know.

“Do you know how hard it is to let a toddler beat you at anything nine times in a row?”

————

tic tac toe – when the first player picks center, if the second player picks a corner, the game should end in a draw, if the second player picks a non corner, the first player should be able to win unless they make a mistake

when waiting at restaurants, I like to play tic tac toe with my daughter, and pick a non corner to let her think through the logic puzzle of getting the win

She went out to dinner with her aunt, report I got afterwards:

“Aunt (redacted) is way better at tic tac toe than you are Dad!”

He would rather let the child win/succeed almost all the time than take the slightest risk that they might lose and consequently start fearing failure. (Do you know how hard it is to let a toddler beat you at anything nine times in a row?) He specifically rejects ever letting the student win. Thus he rejects starting with competition too soon, instead builds puzzles out of chess, such as endgames. what most would consider the primary attributes of an “education”.

Which are? boredom and overloading? pretending to “get through the material”? When you put it that way, maybe doing nothing is an improvement. Have you considered unschooling?

Nearly the best you’re gonna get is a private school that tries “crazy” things like not assigning ball-numbing homework sets and maybe letting teenagers start school later than 6:45 AM.

This is probably just hyperbole, but it makes you sound like you haven’t heard of the single most common atypical program, Montessori. No, it doesn’t engineer fascinations, but it does avoid the most basic pitfalls.

I definitely didn’t read those quoted snippets as a rejection of letting the student win. I will need to read the full book to clarify this fully for myself, I suppose.

My kids are in a Montessori charter school. It avoids the most basic pitfalls but it’s still required to adhere to the federally mandated curriculum, meaning there’s always going to be an emphasis on “getting through the material” rather than slow, methodical mastery.

I would seriously try unschooling if it weren’t for life circumstances requiring that I rely on school as a form of childcare.

When I said “specifically,” I didn’t mean to imply that it was what he said here, but I don’t remember where I read it, probably here , but I can’t find a quote that much matches it.

Searching both sources for “win,” I find several quotes from all over the spectrum.

We should make sure not to always win against the child; we should let them win sometimes so that they feel that they also are capable of thinking.

One should get the child to play a great deal, but always with suitable partners, who have a generally similar playing ability. On some occasions they can be weaker, on some stronger, so that the child experiences what winning and losing are like. But one must certainly find the right proportion.

Remember to let the child win most of the time.

To provide an advantage for the child, don’t play with less pieces, because that changes the structure of the game. Instead, provide yourself a very short time limit, or deliberately make a mistake, so the child can learn to notice them.

If you’re thinking of unschooling, Sudbury Valley schools, if there is any near you, espouse an unschool-type philosophy.

Montessori is big on a lot of this stuff. Learning is at a child’s own pace, with hands-on games if possible. It’s super expensive because of all the manipulatives involved, but very popular around here. There are like three Montessori schools and one hybrid Montessori school in our small town. Other areas may be different.

You probably don’t need an education degree, … to make it happen

Some might suspect it is positively harmful:

What if everything you knew about education is wrong

Progressively Worse

What with all the talk of the virtues of Esperanto, I feel like a link to Justin Rye’s “Learn Not To Speak Esperanto” is obligatory here…

(Also, Scott, the “on the end goal” paragraph is missing blockquote tags.)

If people here were interested in trying this method with their own current or future children, what would be their curriculum choices? Given that how to think well is the universally general specialisation, what would that look like taught à la Polgar?

I don’t think it matters that much what you choose, as long as you choose something that is fun for your children and encourages intellectual growth. I would teach my children reading at an early age, and show them the things I like most, which for me would be music and mathematics. I mean, Polgar more or less suggests spending a lot of quality time with your kids teaching them things in a way that raises their interest.

By the way, here’s an article where a father taught his son video gaming on a really high level: https://medium.com/message/playing-with-my-son-e5226ff0a7c3 I think that fits other topic well, video gaming is of course also a cultural ability. And you see that it’s not about putting your son in front of a play station, you have to put some thought into what you do so your child ends up one of the most video-game-educated person on the planet.

I suspect that quite a few Americans, when reading this “I suspect Polgar was a naturally gifted teacher, and his daughters naturally curious students, and that he never really encountered problems in this regard and doesn’t expect other people to either.” will think about how unfair and unjust this situation is and how the Polgar children should have been made to hate school and learning just like everyone else. At least they should have been made more aware of their privilege and should have had to publicly denounce it. This attitude seems especially prevalent in pedagogical circles.

I think you’re stretching it a bit- I dropped out of a big teaching credential program in California most of the way through. The prevalent attitude would have been something more like “kids like that will do well regardless. We should focus our effort on the disadvantaged and struggling.”

As a teacher and later homeschool parent, I couldn’t get past that schedule. is that nine hours of organized study a day? And only one hour of it for “general education” like reading, writing, history? I think the school district would not be pleased if I told them I’d decided to basically not even bother teaching my kid to read because I was busy teaching them chess.

It is possible to do a kindergarten or first-grade education in roughly an hour a day, because there’s not a whole lot they’re learning and their focus isn’t really that good either. I taught my kid to read in an hour a day, we sort of did some math here and there, and for other subjects we watched videos or played games. But no way could I have gotten his six-year-old self to cooperate in activities organized by me for nine hours a day. Much less when he was three years old. But as he gets older, there’s more he’ll have to learn, so when exactly is he supposed to fit in world history or physics? When does he learn to write a good essay or do algebra? These might not be super-important skills if he wound up being a chess genius, but you can only be a chess genius for a living if you make it into the very top, I would imagine. That’s true of many genius-type skills like piano playing as well. There are no end of really good violinists out there who aren’t *quite* good enough to perform for a living, so they wind up teaching violin part time or just giving it up altogether. That’s a mighty big gamble to make on a kid. But if you lose the gamble, what other skills does he have? Can he go to college? Probably not, if he’s only dabbled in algebra and essay-writing!

Honestly this reads a lot like “how to raise an autistic kid.” If extreme savant skills in one area and deficiencies in the rest are your goal, I’m sure you can do that. But I’m not entirely sure it’s a good goal; it seems a bit too high-variance where you *might* get a chess star but on the other hand you *might* have him living in your basement at 30.

Now. That said. Unschooling can do a lot of this, because when a child is really, really obsessed with something he really will spend nine hours a day on it, and provided it’s not just videogames (and maybe even if it is!) he’s going to learn something from it, so you can let him have at it. But part of unschooling is that kids lose interest in one thing and take up another, so over time they’re getting broad skills. Or sometimes you use one interest as a tie-in to another interest, like Minecraft math or something. I would be really, really leery of letting a child neglect other areas of education *even if* his skills at his favorite thing were above average. There are very few skills you can be good enough at that nobody cares that you can’t do your own taxes or write your own resume.

However I’m definitely going to take his advice about chess instruction. My eldest is mildly autistic and he is bananas for chess, but he can’t actually play it very well at all. My husband has played with him a few times and always beats him easily, which invariably ends in tears. I’m going to suggest he let the Wookiee win.

I found the comments on language learning interesting. Scott seems at best only open-minded about the benefits of learning a foreign language. This is exactly the starting viewpoint I want in seeking advice on making my decision around my daughter’s learning.

I’m not really sure what to think of this – language learning might be more important if you grow up speaking Hungarian rather than English, and Polgar seems so enthusiastic an Esperantist that it’s hard to picture him recommending it for purely rational reasons – but he’s quite insistent on it.

I only speak English and have a toddler growing up in an English speaking country. I’m wondering how much resource to put into her learning one or more languages. I’m not really sold on the practical value of it and not looking to be convinced of that – but I have found the information I’ve read from respected scientists that foreign language acquisition improves some non-linguistic problem cognition compelling. The point that the perception of progress in the child’s mind is a sell on the process of learning overall is an interesting addition.

The trouble is the sources always seem to be from those who have already mastered several languages. I can’t help but think there is a bias there. Both in underestimating the costs/difficulty of learning and in overselling the value of speaking more than one language (since they are effectively talking up their own book.)

My wife and I only speak English, our schooling in a foreign language was the typically poor, half-hearted effort that doesn’t begin till age 12 but even taking that into account I do think we both have below average natural language learning ability. However it’s clearly a lot easier for young children and her abilities could be quite different from ours.

Given money and time are finite, and the marginal effort could be put into music, general learning or just play – do any readers have any new viewpoints on whether language learning is of high value even discounting any practical application. Has anyone looked at the quality of studies on foreign language learning’s impact on the brain?

The primary benefit of being bilingual as an American is that it signifies upper-class status. This is very useful for the purposes of admission into top universities.

For these purposes, the language should have three characteristics. First, it should have limited practical use. Second, it should be associated with high culture. Third, it shouldn’t reflect your ethnic background but be an obvious affectation. Under my theory, languages like French German and Russian would be ideal for these purposes in America.

( It would also mean that my choice to learn German was a tactical mistake. My family never anglicized my surname, so even though I’m actually a native English speaker it’s a much less impressive-looking accomplishment. )

It’s not very important how well the child actually speaks the language because it’s unlikely that interviewers will make any serious attempt to probe her fluency.

Wouldn’t Spanish make a lot more sense for Americans? One of your neighbours speaks Spanish, an increasing proportion of the US population speaks Spanish as a native language and the rest of America (or Americas if you consider it to be two continents) minus Brazil, Suriname, French Guayana (which together have a lower population than many cities in the US) an a couple of islands speaks Spanish.

Plus it is closer to English than German and especially Russian and probably a bit easier (way more sensible spelling and easier pronunciation) than French. It makes sense to learn German for Europeans and Russian also to some degree, but learning French is in many ways a relic of a bygone era, Spanish is the new French (again).

That’s why it doesn’t make sense to learn Spanish. It’s considered a very easy language to learn, is practical in day-to-day life and is associated with manual labor. Exactly the opposite of what you want your children to learn if you’re an upwardly-mobile middle class family.

That said, personally I found German to be much more similar to English than the romance languages I briefly studied. To each his own.

I speak both German and English as well as ok-ish Spanish and even Spanish is closer to English than German is, French is even closer than that. German has grammatical cases, 3 genders (and they are a mess which is governed by little to no rules , mostly due to shifts where many of older suffixes were dropped from the words and so many words have a particular gender because they used to have the appropriate suffix which you can’t see any more) and while it shares quite a few roots with English, those are usually the easy everyday words which are, well, easy to learn anyway. French/Latin is the source of the more complicated English words which makes it easier I’d say. German is more phonetic than French, but that seems like the only thing that makes it easier for an English speaker.

If Spanish is not high-status due to its practicality (a weird concept for me, I’m a bit skeptical about it being exactly as you say, but I’m European, we have to learn languages for practical reasons), then learn Portuguese. You’ll be able to sort of understand Spanish after that and half of South America speaks Portuguese (even though in just one, albeit huge, country). Plus, IMO it sounds great, it is more suave than Spanish and less overtly sweet than French. Particularly Brazilian Portuguese sounds amazing .

I guess I forgot Quebec. But nobody seems to like them anyway, at least not in Canada 🙂

a weird concept for me, I’m a bit skeptical about it being exactly as you say, but I’m European, we have to learn languages for practical reasons

It’s not that complex. This is exactly the sort of situation the term “signalling” was meant to apply to.

In America, we have never had titles of nobility: in fact, they’re explicitly forbidden by the Constitution . And we like to imagine that there’s no class hierarchy, that “anyone can become President.”

At the same time, the upper classes have traditionally had a distinctly aristocratic character. Boston Brahmins and all that. And they need to be able to distinguish themselves from the plebs, especially for university admissions to Ivy league schools.

Acquiring a time-consuming and impractical skill, like learning French and gaining a passing familiarity with French literature, signals that one has money to spare and is clued into the current intellectual fashion. It’s something that will catch the eye of admissions and let them know that you’re one of them.

I am not sure if this is already captured in ‘signaling high status’, but I generally think of signaling as being a proxy for something else, so in this case, I come from a nice family that took me to Europe and museums when I was a child. I think being multilingual/bilingual has an additional benefit in blue tribe spaces of being implicitly cool, which is just another boost to your social prospects.

That would fail the “limited practical use” criterion.

Yeah, I missed that. I’m a bit skeptical about it actually being like that, though. Most Americans (and English native speakers in general) don’t speak any foreign languages (or at least not on any notable level). Unless Spanish is your native language, speaking it fluently should still be considered impressive in the US. But I’m just guessing.

Nah, you’re right, Tibor. The only way to edge out Spanish in terms of prestige is with a more difficult but still commonly spoken language like Arabic or Mandarin. Especially that last one, I think it’s currently the most fashionable for upper-class prep/private schools. Learning Latin or some Euro langauge where all the native speakers are bilingual will impress no one.

Also, no one in America is assuming that a German name = likely to have learned German natively in the home. Nabil’s post reads like a dispatch from 1910.

You’re probably right about the name issue. Looking back more often people just assume that I’m Jewish. Some people pick up on it immediately in person but it’s probably not most people’s first thought.

Learning Latin or some Euro [language] where all the native speakers are bilingual will impress no one.

I’ve literally never heard anyone call Spanish fluency impressive. Chinese at least is famously difficult. Spanish is the language you take because you want to sleep through your language requirement.

Where do people consider Arabic or Spanish to be the most prestigious languages? Is this something that’s big in elite pre-K but hasn’t reached the current crop of students yet?

Arabic seemed extremely prestigious when I was in college, but that might have been an artifact of going to school in DC during the height of the Iraq occupation.

Otherwise, I guess it’s not so much that I think Spanish is super-prestigious (because it certainly is common as dirt) as that I think you’re off about the relative uselessness of the (other) European languages being a positive signaler. I think German and French, especially, will be read by most as “the language program at the school this person attended was very out of date.” In the extremes, I think you’re probably still right–if you were fluent in Sanskrit or Anishinaabe, yea, then you’re gonna stand out–but otherwise I bet you’re better off signalling intelligence by making a practical, intelligent choice, which in the US is pretty much always going to be Spanish (with honorable mentions to Arabic and Mandarin).

@Nabil ad Dajjal: In Europe, Spanish fluency is considered relatively impressive, unless you’re in southern France or Portugal I guess. Most people learn either French or German as a second foreign language (everyone learns English as the first). I find that people consider it very impressive that I speak 5 languages, even though I’m not really that good in 2 of them (and those two are also very similar to each other), everyone speaks relatively good English at the university and learning German is easy when you reside in Germany (still a lot of foreign students don’t ever learn it). Plus my German is still far from perfect. But people somehow imagine it is really difficult to do that while really it gets easier with each new language from the same language group and in fact it might be harder to learn Mandarin than to learn 4 languages from the Indo-European branch when your native tongue also belongs to that branch.

In fact really good fluency of English is still considered mildly impressive in Europe (outside of the UK, Malta and Ireland, obviously). Europeans with college degrees (a lower percentage of the population than in the US) will generally speak English quite well, but most are still far from perfect and even at the universities you hear constructions like “If you would have X then you would obtain Y” (which is grammatically perfectly correct in German or Czech, but I have to cringe whenever I hear that in English…well, I guess it is still better than one old German professor who said that someone “became a job” – bekommen means to be given in German). Other common German errors are using “there is” where you should say “there are” (like “there is two functions”…because in German you say “Es gibt”…which literally means It gives and is used the same way the “there is/are” English construction in fact occasionally a student literally writes “It gives”). Czechs often either omit articles where they shouldn’t or overcompensate and use them where they should be used (It is quite possible I do it as well sometimes but I’m pretty sure I don’t do it nearly as often). If you ignore the people with university education, most Europeans probably aren’t bilingual in any meaningful sense. They are probably fluent enough in English to order something in a restaurant or ask for directions when on holiday in another country, but that’s about that.

Some countries fare better than others though. Pretty much all Dutch people speak English very well, I think the same holds for Swedes and Norwegians as well (probably a combination of no dubbing on TV and relative proximity to the English language).

I think continental Europeans also sometimes try to signal status by learning received pronunciation in English. I hate it though, since mostly it is still slightly off and it just sounds snobbish. I guess it is still better than when people don’t bother with the accent at all and talk like stereotypical Hollywood “foreign guy” characters.

Learning Spanish is only useful if you couple it with your White Man’s Burden work in Haiti or Ecudaor or whatever (also a boon on your college application).

Learning Spanish to interact with low-class workers is a detriment to your upper-class status. Who talks to the help? You might as well say “I LOVE NASCAR, VROOOOM, GO DALE EARNHARDT” in your personal essay.

Haitians speak French. Also, do lower-class Americans (who are not of Latin American origin) actually speak Spanish? I somehow doubt it.

I generally find the concept of stuff like volunteer work and sports achievements influencing the college admission strange (or writing any personal essays or whatever). I don’t think there is anything like that in Europe, universities only care about your high school grades and your entry exam scores.

Yeah you guys have nailed it. I’ve instinctively played the game without realizing why I’m making the moves I have so far.

The prep school application was re-written to include the Mandarin learning and there’s a theory that it was exactly what pushed it over the line. I guess the equivalent of Spanish here would be putting down that Kurdish or similar is spoken at home.

UK university admission might or might not take something like Mandarin into account but the private schools before do and those are arguably a bigger component of achieving (as well as signalling) upper middle-class status.

I’m still interested in views on what it achieves beyond signalling though!

2irons: Well, Mandarin is a marketable skill in itself if you actually speak it well, I think. Not by itself, probably. If a company wants to impress their Chinese partners they will probably rather hire someone from China who speaks English to do that, but if you speak Mandarin and can do something else as well, I guess it is a plus. But the language is really hard, or rather the writing system is really hard. On the plus side, you will be able to communicate in written form with speakers of very different languages, such as Cantonese and maybe even Japanese?

Still, time is limited and spending it learning Mandarin unless you know why seems a bit strange – unless you like it for the language itself but this is not the case with little kids. If you want to learn multiple languages, in Europe it makes sense to learn one of each of the three branches of Indo-European languages (for these purposes, English is really Germano-romance), because that allows you to learn all other Indo-European languages with relative ease, so pretty much all European languages (Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian are not Indo-European, all other languages in Europe are, unless you count Georgia and Armenia as Europe and unless you count Basque). I’d go for Spanish, Russian and German. Each have the largest number of speakers in their language groups and Spanish and Russian are probably the easiest in their respective groups (Russians have a weird alphabet but it is basically the Greek alphabet and even if you don’t know that it is just learning 25 or so letters, not a big deal). German is probably the hardest Germanic language but by far the most spoken one and other Germanic languages are so close to English that an English native would pick them up with ease. German also has some features common with Slavic languages – grammatical cases and three grammatical genders. Once you learn the concept in one language you don’t have to relearn it in another, you just learn how it is constructed. If you learn these three languages, you will kind of understand something everywhere in Europe outside of Finland, Estonia, Hungary…probably also Albania and Greece.

And learning all three will probably take about as much effort as learning Mandarin properly. Russian will be the hardest for an English native speaker, Spanish the easiest. I learned Spanish using pretty much just a free app called Duolingo in about a year (to a level where I could have a basic conversation on most topics) and the only sort-of-romance language I spoke before that was English (technically I had a year of French in the 10th grade but I forgot everything since). So I’d start with Spanish, then German and then Russian.

Hoho – this appears to be exactly the route we are going down. We live in London and she is learning Mandarin. French or German have a much less steep learning curve but given our proximity to Europe arguably too high a possibility of practical use.

In all seriousness though, a switch to one of those in her next school might be sensible depending on the assessment of the sunk costs at that point. Mandarin or Russian were the only options at her nursery. Learning to sing nursery rhymes and some words through play I think fits in with many of the interpretations of what Polgar was doing right without a lot of downside. But if the learning curve is still steep the decision gets harder.

Keep in mind that many kids absolutely despise having to learn a language with no application. “It will look good for top universities’ admission boards” does not count as an application for them.

Then they should learn Japanese. Watching anime without subtitles is useful to a teenager, while being able to easily travel to Japan might be useful to them as an adult..

True enough, but many kids also dislike brussel sprouts.

Part of being a parent is making choices for your children that will pay off long term. If kids knew and cared what would benefit them a decade down the line they wouldn’t need parenting in the first place.

Is there any reason to force children to eat brussel sprouts?

– You like it yourself and don’t want to cook two meals – learning to enjoy/accept bitter food opens up many food options – You have to force many/most children to eat healthy food anyway or they’ll end up just eating junk food – Brussels sprouts have been bred to be far less bitter than in the past, so its status as kid-torture food is probably no longer valid – My country is the biggest exporter, so it helps our economy if people eat them – I think their taste is pretty nice when roasted or sauteed

I mean, if you roast and salt them you probably won’t have to coerce your kid into eating them, because they will be delicious . (If “force your kid to eat brussels sprouts” means “require them to take one bite before dismissing the food out of hand,” then I retract my objections to it as a get-your-kid-to-eat-vegetables strategy.)

– I think their taste is pretty nice when roasted or sautéed

Most people seem to hate Brussel sprouts because their parents boiled them. Pretty much the worst way to cook Brussel sprouts….or any vegetable….

I might hate Brussels sprouts for their bitterness, if I could get past their foul odor long enough to actually put one in my mouth.

I thought the reason for making kids eat vegetables they find unpalatable is for nutritional purposes during their childhood, not so much building adult habits.

If a kid isn’t very very gifted with languages and they have no reason to use the language they might get an A in the class but they won’t learn the language. (How many Europeans speak English? How many Americans speak Spanish? This is not because France has a mind-bogglingly good educational system.)

That said, it’s not impossible to create reasons. Move to Miami, hire a Spanish nanny and refuse to let them speak English, and when your kid’s a teenager forbid any trashy TV other than telenovelas. Your kid will speak Spanish like a native. If you prefer Mandarin, of course, you’ll have to move to your local Chinatown and introduce them to C-dramas.

As a person who loves vegetables coercion is also a terrible way to get people to eat vegetables as adults, which is presumably the goal.

No, your kid will learn to speak like a telenovela character, they will say things like “mi reina!” on a daily basis and everyone will think they’re weird 😛 But yeah, I understand your general point.

they will say things like “mi reina!” on a daily basis

It’ll turn them gay????

@Aapje: Worse. Macho gay!

That’s interesting about brussels sprouts having been bred to be less bitter.

I’ve become somewhat more tolerant (not very tolerant) of bitter flavors just with the passage of time. I’m not sure that forcing myself to eat bitter things would have accelerated the process.

Thanks for the book and the review.

It reminded me of another study of genius:

July 1994, Communications of the ACM, page 26:

(Interviewer): …For an older student in a conservatory, we can imagine having to study Gregorian chants for a few months before getting any highly (positive) feedback. But in the case of a five-year-old child learning piano or composing, we cannot depend only on delayed feedback or abstract feedback. Minsky: I’m afraid that’s true, at least for most young children, but the evidence is that many of our foremost achievers developed under conditions that are not much like those of present-day mass education. Robert Lawler just showed me a paper by Harold Macurdy on the child pattern of genius. Macurdy reviews the early education of many eminent people from the last couple of centuries and concludes (1) that most of them had an enormous amount of attention paid to them by one or both parents and (2) that generally they were relatively isolated from other children. This is very different from what most people today consider an ideal school. It seems to me that much of what we call education is really socialization. Consider what we do to our kids. Is it really a good idea to send your 6-year-old into a room full of 6-year-olds, and then, the next year, to put your 7-year-old in with 7-year-olds, and so on? A simple recursive argument suggests this exposes them to a real danger of all growing up with the minds of 6-year-olds. And, so far as I can see, that’s exactly what happens.

That is all largely overlapping with my own feelings and views at age 4-14 (numbers semi-arbitrarily chosen). If my childhood intuition, and Polgar, and Macurdy, and Minsky, were wrong about adults’ role and socialization with peers, we surely comprise an interesting minority group.

Having said that, “genius” means different things:

“Genius Is Not about Excelling at Something—It’s about Doing Things Differently” : Eric Weinstein ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzdLBGPidAM )

Thanks for posting, this looks very interesting.

Here is a link I found for the McCurdy paper:

http://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/jncas/id/2279

Is it really a good idea to send your 6-year-old into a room full of 6-year-olds, and then, the next year, to put your 7-year-old in with 7-year-olds, and so on? A simple recursive argument suggests this exposes them to a real danger of all growing up with the minds of 6-year-olds.

One common thread in the comments is concern about the risks of specialization. As a more generalist type myself, I’m interested in thinking about how this Pulgar debate applies to polymaths. I have no interest in raising a Chess Grandmaster per ce, to me the goal would be raising a child who by the age of 20 may be a Grandmaster, may be a piano virtuoso, whatever their one thing is, they have a handle on it–but who is also curious about the world and equipped to go on to explore new interests and gain new proficiencies.

I’m more interested in raising a Ben Franklin or a Goethe type than a chess savant.

It seems like Pulgar’s methods are still really relevant, though. A concern seems to be the opportunity costs of specialization. But it is not a zero-sum game. One would pick up skills on the way to becoming a chess grandmaster that should transfer well to other areas–focus, self-directed learning, competition/sportsmanship, social skills, etc.

This is basically what Jacob Lund Fisker outlines in his book “Early Retirement Extreme” (ignore the title, book changed my life). He was an astrophysics PhD and post-doc, published a bunch of papers etc, but also on the crazy frugal/minimalist end of the spectrum. He retired on his savings from his stipend and salary (!) and has devoted the rest of his life to skill acquisition. He went on to become a competitive regatta racer, an author, and a quant at some hedge fund. He mentions in his book that specializing has a snowball effect–the confidence that comes from mastery in one area helps one in new endeavors.

Piotr Wozniak, the SuperMemo guy, also talks about this. Here are some related links, maybe there’s something in here that other commenters will tease out into a grand unified theory of Renaissance education that uses rationality techniques to find the perfect balance between specializing and generalizing.

https://www.1843magazine.com/content/edward-carr/last-days-polymath

http://super-memory.com/articles/genius.htm

I have conflicting thoughts on this:

First: Genius-level accomplishment might be much more difficult circa 2017 than it was circa 1776. Not only do we have many more geniuses, but we also have several centuries of accumulated intellectual capital. Making a sizable contribution to any field may be much harder now, and it may be much more difficult to compete at high-level competitions. So, yes, specialization would be in fact required to become a truly exceptional.

Second: Yeah, being a specialist sounds like it sucks.

I made a comment about the Scott Adams theory of success above. He said it’s not really feasible to get to the 99th percentile. What you really want are two complimentary skills that are both in the 80th percentile. So Scott is good at writing jokes and good at drawing…not great, but in 80th percentile, so he can float himself as a cartoonist.

My background is business, and businesses are all about leveraging different capabilities from different people. This can be extrapolated to any organization, but it requires a different skill set called “leadership” and “management.” So Elon Musk can simultaneously make huge world-changing advances in rocketry, automobiles, solar energy, and transportation infrastructure, because he can lead/manage very well.

I should read this book. But it sounds like Polgar specifically aims for single-domain excellence. That rules out excellence/genius akin to Elon Musk or Scott Adams.

That sounds much more poly-math to me than specialized.

We had centuries of accumulated intellectual capital in the 1940s, too, and we weren’t exactly short on geniuses then.

So what I need to do is find a computer-programming stay-at-home husband. I will get on that.

Well, if I understand the gender distribution at SSC correctly, you are posting in ( one of ) the right place(s), so you’re on the right track at least. I suspect a next step would be to set up, and then post, an email where more private expressions of potential interest can be directed.

I just stumbled upon this recent Guardian article (“ Why there’s no such thing as a gifted child “), by Wendy Berliner. She is the co-author of a new book called, Great Minds and How to Grow Them . I have no children, and I’m not especially interested in this subject, but I thought I would pass along the information, in case anyone wants to read the book and compare it to Polgar’s work.

Firstly, the fact that Laszlo claims that ‘geniuses are made, not born’ shows he is a ‘blank slate’ proponent, which I believe to be a faulty assumption, and demonstrates that he clearly knows virtually nothing about even his own children. Perhaps he might have had his eyes opened had he managed to beget a son or two, rather than 3 daughters.

Secondly, I would be most impressed if he was able to demonstrate his methods on someone other than 3 cherry-picked examples. Say, if he had one natural-born daughter and two other adopted daughters, one from Sub-Saharan Africa, and one from West Virginia. Having the same results from that grouping would indeed be impressive (to say the least).

I struggle to find anything exceptional or surprising here, other than the obvious – 2 parents with exceptionally high IQs begat 3 sisters with high IQs (probably > +2SD)

Levitt comes up with a equation which relates ELO (chess rating) and IQ score: ELO ~ (10 x IQ) + 1000 https://thechessworld.com/articles/healthpsycology/chess-rating-and-iq-score-correlation/ The “~” symbol means “given many years of effort will tend to be equal approximately”.

Note that this gives only an approximation, and its veracity has certainly been challenged, particularly because of the measured IQ of Garry Kasporov (135), who, under the above rule should have had an IQ of around 190. Well, at least the ‘many years of effort’ are definitely there in spades.

Susan 2577 or an IQ of approx. 157 Sofia 2505 or an IQ of approx. 150 Judit 2735 or an IQ of approx. 170

According to this sceptical article, the Polgar sisters likely had IQs in the 120-140 range: http://greyenlightenment.com/the-polgar-prodigies-is-genius-born-or-made/

And it’s conclusion? “So are geniuses born or made? For highly g-loaded activities, it’s a virtual certainty the former, and that the Polgar sisters succeeded because of high IQ and other biological factors, with parenting perhaps a necessary but still insufficient condition.”

I guess this proves that brilliant people still continue to bring forth stupid ideas.

> Get those four things right – early start, single-subject focus, 1:1 home schooling, and a great parent/teacher – and the rest is just common-sense advice.

What are the chances of these things to fall in place together? Many of which run counter to common wisdom or intuition.

Early start (with 3) runs counter to the belief that small kids can do the stuff much older children or adults can. And in some cases like reading this is supported by by evidence (exceptions notwithstanding). I know of no other people who tried to raise numerate children by singing counting rhymes to infants or something comparable. 10% maybe?

Single subject also seems to run counter to raise “balanced and well adjusted” children with a wide and general education. I don’t see a contradiction. What I do see is that whenever a child does find an something really interesting that is not on the radar of acceptable things of the parents there is a tendency to restrict this “distraction”. I was lucky that my parents let me spend insane hours at the home computer despite not knowing that it would pay off for me.

Home schooling is done for only 3.4% of american children. It’s not available or feasible everywhere (in Germany it’s verboten). I think doing so correlates with being a good teacher (though Polgar is another level). But good teachers are seldom too and also need their own 10K practice.

In comparison being a good parent is comparatively frequent I hope. But it is an independent factor I think.

The rest being common sense is a bit easy on how infrequent common sense actually is. And even if there is common sense it still needs to be applied with discipline and we know how hard that is with all the other things we do.

On top of that I think there is another requirement that is not in the list of four things: Doing enough hours per day. Polgar states 9 hours a day. This really sounds a lot. And I understand that he and his daughters enjoyed it.

If I multiply some randomly taken fractions for these requirements I’d guess that less than 1 in 10000 hit this sweet spot. I surely don’t. All my boys could do fractions and some exponentials before school. And it was fun. But the curve flattened when they got to school where it stopped being fun.

I wonder whether smarter parents can hit this sweet easier or whether finding it at all requires a certain amount of smarts (or else luck). If so we should see long tails in the distribution of genius level results.

My impression is that chess is a field in which the benefits of starting early are unusually large — virtually every professional chess player today started playing at a very young age, and this was true to a lesser extent even in earlier days when the general skill level was lower than it is now.

Certainly the Polgar method is interesting, but I don’t see it as the pilot test for a school. Schools function under vastly different constraints, chief among them is maintaining a fairly high student/teacher ratio, which precludes the teacher spending much time one-on-one with any particular student. The result is a mass-production system, which is either too slow or two fast for most students, and no focus on one single subject for any student. Additionally, the school is judged either by the skills of the median student, or by the skills of the worst student; there’s little credit given for turning out 1/10 of the students as geniuses.

One place these ideas *are* applicable is the old system where the rich engaged tutors for their children, and the tutor could work with each student intensively. But that doesn’t seem to have been enormously successful. While a larger fraction of observed geniuses have been children of the affluent, that seems to be more of a reflection of economic opportunity, and the children of the affluent have never been credited with being more brilliant than the children of the middle classes (whatever those were at the time).

One could ask, is it really possible for one person to teach 10 children in this manner? In the one case on record, two people taught three children. Also, I’d like to know how the Polgar family was supported. In my experience of growing up in a “1960 traditional” family, the father spent a large fraction of his hours earning money and the mother spent a large fraction of her hours maintaining the household. But the Wikipedia page “László Polgár” does not suggest that either parent maintained ordinary employment. However, he is well-known for writing educational books on chess, so perhaps he was supported by the Hungarian chess system.

I think the confounding factor is Laszlo Polgar is a father teaching his children not a stranger teaching someone else’s children. One way to generalize his solution for mass education would be 15 years of paid child-rearing time per child. During that time the father and mother use internet connected services to help them choose, manage and teach a specialized area of knowledge to their children. All uses of these systems are tracked and monitored. Machine learning sifts through the data and hunts for deviants, free riders and anyone doing a poor job. Human agents review the results of the algorithm, investigate and prosecute anyone breaking the law. Politics goes on as normal; new laws are created, some laws removed, some laws are enforced some years and not other years.

I see nothing that could go wrong.

At least, Laszlo Polgar should add to his book, “I’m one of the very few people in the world who makes his living teaching master-level chess players. My children happened to choose chess as the subject they would specialize in. And it turned out that I could train them to be very good at it!”

I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned Anders Ericsson and Peak. He pretty much describes the method needed and what it was that made the Polgar’s successful. He calls it deliberate practice and gives lots of examples and research. The problem is that it does not necessarily work in areas where measurement of progress is difficult. So it works well for sports, physical activities, chess, languages, very specialised math but not necessarily for science or humanities (although each of these has components that would be susceptible to this sort of approach). It is also not a good approach for general education – you have to focus on one thing to the exclusion of too much else. And it’s not clear we would be living in a better society consisting of people thus educated. It’s also not clear if it would really work for everyone – the practice is important but you also need the ‘Grit’ to stick with it. Ericsson and Duckworth seem to have complementary views on how to achieve it but they agree that it’s a prerequisite.

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The Polgar Sisters – Laszlo crazy experiment

From the book  The Art of Performance

Educational psychologist László Polgár had just finished studying the biographies of 400 geniuses. From Socrates to Einstein, he researched them all. And now he was preparing for one of the most extreme experiments ever done—so extreme that people thought he was going crazy. A local government even told him to see a psychiatrist to “heal him of his delusions.” But Polgár was determined. He only needed a wife who was willing to jump on board.

He started corresponding with a number of young ladies, outlining the pedagogical project he had in mind. Klára, a foreign language teacher, was one of them. “Like many at the time, I thought he was crazy” Klára recalls, “but we agreed to meet.” When they were dating, Klára was charmed by him and got interested in his bold idea. They ended up marrying. And so the experiment began.

They named their first daughter Susan. And soon Sofia and Judit followed. László and Klára quit their jobs and devoted their lives to home schooling their 3 children. Polgár believed talent did not exist. Anyone could become a master in any field—the top 3 percent—if you applied the right kind of practice. “A genius is not born, but is educated and trained” Polgár tells  The   Washington Post . “When a child is born healthy, it is a potential genius.” Polgár had always been an advocate of the practice theory as opposed to the talent theory. He wrote papers on the subject and lobbied with government to change the education system. But nobody wanted to listen. “Children have extraordinary potential, and it’s up to society to unlock it,” Polgár says. “The problem is that people, for some reason, do not want to believe it. They seem to think that excellence is only open to others, not themselves.” It seems that people’s mindsets are programmed incorrectly.

As nobody wanted to listen to what he had to say, the only way was to prove it. He was going to raise his children to become geniuses. It took him a long time to pick a field to focus on. After his first daughter was born, he knew it was time to finally make a decision. “I needed Susan’s achievements to be so dramatic that nobody could question their authenticity,” he says. “That was the only way to convince people that their ideas about excellence were all wrong. And then it hit me: chess.” He decided to go for chess because the measurement was objective. “If my child had been trained as an artist or novelist, people could have argued about whether she was genuinely world-class or not. But chess has an objective rating based on performance, so there is no possible argument.” In other words, if he announced  upfront  that his children would be chess geniuses and was able to pull it off, his theory about mastery was proven.

Polgár, an amateur chess player himself, dived into the depths of the game and learned as much as possible about chess training. With the help of his wife, he turned their modest apartment in the heart of  Budapest  into a real chess temple. It had a library with thousands of chess books stuffed onto shelves on one wall, with another wall lined with sketches of chess scenes. A file card system took up an entire third wall. It included records of previous games and even an index of potential competitors’ tournament histories.

Once he felt sufficiently developed as a trainer, he started to introduce chess to each of his daughters. And while the children were also learning all the regular subjects and spoke several languages, chess was always at the core.

Here’s what happened:

At age 4, Susan, the eldest of the Polgár sisters, won her first chess tournament, the Budapest Girls Under-11 Championship, with a 10-0 score. At age 12, she won the World Under-16 Girls Championship. At age 15, despite restrictions on her freedom to play in international tournaments, she became the top-rated female chess player in the world. At age 22, Susan was the first woman to earn the men’s Grandmaster title in the conventional way—the highest rank in chess. By the end of her career, she had won the World Championship for women on 4 occasions and 5 chess Olympiads. She remains the only person in history, male or female, to win the Chess Triple Crown (the Rapid, Blitz, and Classical World Championships). In December 2006, she married her long-time business manager and friend, Paul Truong. She now lives in the US where she runs a chess institute and coaches the Webster University chess team, the number 1 ranked team in the nation.

Sofia, the middle sister, won the gold medal at the under-11 Hungarian Championship for girls, the World Under-14 championship for girls, and numerous chess Olympiads and championships. But she is best known for the ‘Miracle in Rome’ where she won 8 straight games against many of the greatest male players. “The odds against such an occurrence must be billions to 1,” one chess expert wrote. It is still seen as one of the most extraordinary chess performances in history. She married fellow chess player Yona Kosashvili and moved to Israel. She now helps to run a chess website and is an acclaimed painter.

Judit, the Benjamin of the family, is considered the best female player of all time. At the age of 12, she was the youngest player ever to break into the Top 100 players’ rating list, ranking number 55. At the age of 15 years and 4 months, she became Grandmaster. At the time, she was the youngest to have done so, breaking the record previously held by former World Champion Bobby Fischer. She defeated 11 current or former world champions in either Rapid or Classical Chess, including  Boris Spassky ,  Anatoly Karpov , and  Garry Kasparov . She occupied the number 1 position for 26 years until she retired in 2015. Today she lives with her husband and 2 children. She authored 2 children’s books on chess and is Head Coach of the Hungarian National Men’s Chess Team. She also founded the Judit Polgár Chess Foundation to bring chess as an educational tool to children in schools.

By publically declaring that his children would become geniuses even before they were born, Polgár took a huge gamble. He could be ridiculed and be the laughing stock of science by stating this upfront.

But even then, the talent myth was hard to kill. When his eldest daughter Susan won a local competition as a 4-year-old, the local newspaper called her a ‘genius.’ And father László remembers many occasions when he was congratulated by other parents for having such talented daughters.

Although Polgár was criticized by some for encouraging his daughters to focus so intensely on chess, the girls later said that they had enjoyed it all. “We spent a lot of hours on the chess board, but it did not seem like a chore because we loved it,” Susan recalls. Father Polgár, always careful not to push his daughters too hard, once found Sofia in the bathroom in the middle of the night, a chessboard balanced across her knees and said “Sophia, leave the pieces alone.” Her reply… “Daddy, they won’t leave me alone!” László Polgár ignited their interest and made them care about the game. They became passionate about chess.

We are all in awe when we discover the work of masters—whether it’s a painting from Monet, a world-class goal from Ronaldo, a musical piece from Mozart, or the innovative ideas from Elon Musk and Steve Jobs in the business world. We admire their greatness. And it’s the right thing to do. Amazing performers should inspire us. But if we’re not careful, when we believe that talent is what got them there, their mastery might discourage us. Why would we try our best if talent and not effort is the ultimate success predictor? Why would we make sacrifices if talent ultimately determines greatness.

And while there might be a few other factors at play, can’t we all agree that talent is overrated? Can’t we all agree that the road to greatness is not paved with talent and good genes? It’s time to kill the talent myth and adopt a different mindset.

Want to discover the real drivers behind top performance? Check out the book  The Art of Performance

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Translated by

The Polgar Experiment – Raising World-class Chess Grandmasters

In my research of developing World-Class talent and in turn, becoming world-class The Polgar Experiment is one of the most interesting case studies on raising Genius Kids.

László Polgár , Hungarian chess teacher and educational psychologist raised his daughters also-known-as Polgár sisters: Susan, Sofia, and Judit, to be chess prodigies.

Polgár’s experiment with his daughters has been called “ one of the most amazing experiments in the history of human education” .

Judit Polgar and Zsuzsa Polgar became the best and second-best female chess players in the world, respectively. Judit is widely considered to be the greatest female chess player ever as she is the only woman to have been ranked in the top 10 worldwide, while Zsuzsa became the Women’s World Chess Champion.

“Geniuses are made, not born” Laszlo Polgar Believes

You can listen to more such stories when you join my next workshop on Be World-Class – How to become Best in your Industry ?

Further Reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Polgar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofia_Polgar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r

Books by Judit – https://www.juditpolgar.com/books

Bio on Judit website – https://www.juditpolgar.com/bio

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Genius Biographies

Laszlo polgar: the father who created chess prodigies.

Laszlo Polgar was studying intelligence in his college. Out of curiosity he read over 400 biographies of geniuses. Everyone from Einstein to Mozart to Socrates. And he came to a staggering conclusion: Genius is not born, he is made. All of the geniuses started at a very young age and studied intensively in one particular subject. 

When Polgar met Klara for the first time, he told her that he intended to have 6 kids and raise them all to be brilliant. In his letters to her, instead of talking about romance, he spoke about his philosophy on creating geniuses. After a year and a half of writing letters, he proposed to her and they married.

They went on to have 3 kids instead of 6. And Polgar raised all his 3 daughters to be chess prodigies!

Susan, Sofia, and Judit all 3 went on to perform some amazing feats in the world of chess. And 2 of the 3 sisters even became grandmasters. 

But do you know the funny thing? The sister who showed the most promise out of all 3 sisters when they were young didn’t end up becoming a grandmaster. Sofia Polgar peaked at international master – a level below grandmaster.

When Sofia was just 14 years old, she took part in a competition that included several grandmasters. And astonishing everyone, she beat all of them. Her performance was rated as high as 2900 points (when usually leading grandmasters have 2700-2800 points.). Many experts rate Sofia’s performance in the competition as one of the top 5 performances Chess has ever seen.

So then what happened? Why did Sofia fail to become a grandmaster herself? Why did she plateau out? What did her father Laszlo miss in creating geniuses?

The missing ingredient required for genius

To be fair, at her peak – Sofia Polgar still became the 6th best women’s chess player for a while. But she didn’t become a Chess genius like her father intended. And that’s because she lacked the “rage to master”.

What’s rage to master? Dr Ellen Winner calls it the innate obsessive desire to improve. And Sofia Polgar lacked the rage to master when it came to chess. She did show early signs of being a prodigy. But ultimately, she just didn’t push far enough to mastery.

Without having the inner rage to master, you can’t become the best. No amount of talent will make you excel. 

Rage to master is not merely being curious. It’s deeper than that. It’s about wanting new knowledge, yes. But it’s also about liking new knowledge. Learning needs to be pleasurable. It needs to be its own reward. 

When is learning not its own reward?

It’s difficult to say how one can improve their rage to master. But it’s easy to see how the rage to master can be suppressed.

• The biggest enemy of the rage to master is chronic stress. Stress makes learning unenjoyable. Stress often stems from envy and getting all of your drive externally – from your competitors alone.
• When monkeys are constantly rewarded for doing tasks, they stop putting in as much effort. Rewarding people and praising them kills the rage to master. As counter intuitive as it sounds, praising people kills their internal drive. That’s why Dr. Carol Dweck recommends that one should never praise a child for how smart he is. If you want to praise, praise how hard working he is.
• Sofia Polgar eventually gave up chess and became an artist. She didn’t push to improve. Not because she found chess hard. But because she found chess easy. It bored her. The difficulty of learning has to be managed. You can’t have it too hard or too easy.

Interestingly, Jenny Wang of Rutgers University conducted research on 5 year old kids. She would read storybooks about weird topics like “contagion.” The goal was to measure how interested the kids were to learn more about the topic after the story was over. Wang found that the kids who knew too little about the topic and didn’t understand it at all, showed no further interest in it. But so did kids who knew a lot about the topic. If they knew a lot, they were bored to learn more about it. The sweet spot was the kids in the middle. A topic has to be just challenging enough to be interesting.

This is precisely the reason why so many child prodigies end up plateauing out as they grow older. The challenge dies. And the learning stops being rewarding.

Do you have to start young to become a genius?

Laszlo Polgar did many things right and he still has a great track record in making his daughters genius at chess. But he did get this other thing wrong too. You don’t have to start young to become a genius.

Case in point is Laszlo himself. He excelled at his job of creating chess prodigies even when he didn’t start from a young age. But he had the rage to master.

Not being a good chess player himself, Laszlo spent a considerable time in learning how best to teach chess. When his oldest daughter Susan was 4 years old, he started her off with playing only with pawns. He then added rooks and knights. And only after a few more weeks were the queens added.

He then meticulously taught her the simple mating moves. Laszlo collected over 1000 one-move mate diagrams. Then he added two three and four move mate diagrams. And slowly took Susan to mastery. Before she turned 5, Susan was beating adults at the game.

Funnily, Laszlo’s most famous book is not any book he wrote on raising geniuses. But its a chess book. A 1000 page book where he collected 5334 unique problems and games. Slowly, he led Susan on a meticulous journey of facing just the right amount of challenge. He built up her love for the game and made it a joy for her. And awakened her rage to master.

Action Summary:

• Do you have the rage to master a specific topic? Go deep and learn about something better than anyone else in the world?
• Manage your stress and fix your reward system to make sure the process of learning is inherently enjoyable for you.

Related posts:

• Michael Dell and the art of the turnaround
• Adolph Zukor: The father of feature films (Or the middlegame strategy to build monopolies)
• Evel Knievel: The father of extreme sports
• Christopher Nolan: Why is he stuck in the 20th century?

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Judit Polgar , Laszlo Polgar , Susan Polgar

Can you raise your child to be a genius?

"Children have extraordinary potential, and it is up to society to unlock it … The problem is that people, for some reason, do not want to believe it.  They seem to think that excellence is only open to others, not [to] themselves." -- László Polgár as told to Matthew Syed in Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

Genesis of an idea

Over 20 years ago I learned of a book called “Nevelj zsenit!” (Bring Up Genius!) by László Polgár .  László was a Hungarian educational psychologist who had a longstanding belief that “Genius was made and not born”.  After studying intelligence as a university student László concluded that the life stories of geniuses were all the same, “…they all started at a very young age and studied (a subject) intensively.”  

Additionally, he observed a discernible pattern -- a parent singularly focused on the child’s success. László subsequently hypothesized that if he took the right approach to child-rearing, he could turn "any healthy newborn" into a genius provided that his educational experiments began before the child’s third birthday and provided that the child began to specialize in a domain by the age of six.

To test his pedagogical theory László implemented his strategies on each of his three daughters resulting in two of them becoming Grandmasters (GMs) in chess with the other daughter becoming an International Master.

Nature vs nurture

Anecdotally, the aforementioned summary of the Polgár nature/nurture experiment doesn’t resonate a great deal with the general public.  Both of the Polgár sisters' parents had  Phd’s in education so weren't inherited genetics  solely responsible for their success?

In order to examine that line of thinking let’s take a more detailed look at three things: the conventional wisdom regarding women and chess (over the years), the nuts and bolts of the Polgár experiment, and the age-related accomplishments of the Polgár sisters.

The conventional wisdom regarding women and chess (over the years)

 “...women, by their nature, are not exceptional chess players: they are not great fighters” -- Garry  Kasparov age 27 (in 1990)

Before the ascension of the Polgár sisters the most famous woman chess player in the world was Vera Menchik  -- a British-Czechoslovak-Russian chess player who was able to defeat several male Grandmasters.  However,  no female player (prior to László's  experiment) managed to defeat the very best male players in the world.  The dearth of elite women chess players led to a wave of theories that held that innate and immutable biological differences between the sexes were responsible for the gender gap present in chess.  

For example, in 1996, of the 450 Grandmasters only 6 (1%) were female (and 1/3 of those 6 female grand masters were László's daughters).

Even in 2015 prominent chess champion Nigel Short  expressed the view that "[ women and men] just have different skills. It would be wonderful to see more girls playing chess, and at a higher level, but rather than fretting about inequality, perhaps we should just gracefully accept it as a fact. ”  (Short expressed this opinion despite having previously lost to Judit Polgár)

Over ten years prior to Nigel's statement scientists Paul Irwing and Richard Lynn  conducted a review of existing studies on sex differences in intelligence and concluded that: 

“Different proportions of men and women with high IQs… may go some way to explaining the greater numbers of men achieving distinctions of various kinds for which a high IQ is required, such as chess Grandmasters , Fields medallists for mathematics, Nobel prize winners and the like.” --  Paul Irwing and Richard Lynn in " Sex differences on the progressive matrices: A meta-analysis. (2005)"

What the latest research shows

Missing in the Irwing and Lynn analysis was an assessment of top-of-the-funnel participation rates.  Thankfully in 2009 Merim Bilalic from Oxford University did that very assessment and he  concluded that the observable gap between male and female chess players can be explained by simple statistics.  Since far more men play chess than women, differences in chess ability at the highest level were entirely predictable considering that even if two groups have the same skill level (and range of skills) the most capable individuals are more likely to come from the larger group.

Bilalic examined a data set encompassing all known German chess players – over 120,000 people, of which 113,000 were men.  He then directly compared the top 100 players for both genders and used a mathematical model to discern the expected difference in their Elo ratings based on the size of the groups to which they belonged.  The results showed that the large overall number of male chess players relative to female players accounted for 96% of the difference in measured ability between the two genders at the highest level of play. 

Conclusion:   If more women participated in chess we would see the gap between the sexes at the elite level close considerably.

A (more) detailed look at the Polgár experiment

“They say it was a coincidence that a man who set about proving the practice theory of excellence using chess just happened to beget the three most talented female chess players in history.  Maybe some people just do not want to believe in the power of practice.”   -- László Polgár as told to Matthew Syed in Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

In the 1960s a young man named  László started plotting one the most daring human experiments in recorded history.  After "... studying the biographies of 400 great intellectuals, from Socrates to Einstein" László concluded that "... a genius is not born but is educated and trained."  He later told the Washington Post that "...when a child is born healthy, it is a potential genius."

He had also written papers on his ideas pertaining to education and lobbied Hungarian government officials in hopes of transforming the domain of education towards a focus on hard work rather than innate talent.  But his ideas were considered so radical that a local government official told him to "see a psychiatrist to heal [himself] of [these] delusions".

Consequently Lászlo felt that the best way to prove his theory was to test it out on his own (future) children -- which led to a search for a wife.  Luckily a Ukrainian women named Klara became a pen pal for Lászlo and, on the strength of his arguments (and their shared vision for parenting), agreed to marry and sire the children that would be in his experiment.

Lászlo dedicated many hours of thought to what domain his children should specialize in so that their achievements would be unimpeachable in the eyes of the public.  He settled on chess due to it being objectively rated based on performance, "so (that) there was no possibility of argument."

The Polgár  husband & wife household was comprised of a hobby chess player ( Lászlo) and a non-chess player (Klara) but Lászlo read as much as he could on the  method and practice of teaching chess and decades later published a book on the subject .

Lászlo also  devoted many hours each day to educating his first daughter (Susan) at home prior to her fifth birthday .  He introduced chess during this time and eventually Susan developed a healthy addiction to the game.  Later his wife  gave birth to a second (Sofia) and third (Judit) daughter.  Sofia and Judit would recall "[making] their way across to the door of the chess room in the family apartment [to peer] through the tiny window, watching Susan being put through [the] paces by their father."  When Sofia and Judit turned five years old they also embarked on their chess training by  Lászlo.

The Polgár  sisters track record from that point on is truly remarkable:

The age-related accomplishments of the Polgár sisters

Susan polgár:  (born april 19, 1969):.

4 years old: Susan wins the Budapest Girls' Under-11 Championship

12 years old : Susan wins the World Under 16 (Girls) Championship

15 years old:  Susan became the top-ranked woman player in the world, and remained ranked in the top three for the next 23 years (until she was 38 years old)

22 years old: Susan became the first woman to earn the Grandmaster title in the conventional way of achieving three GM norms and an Elo rating over 2500 (Nona Gaprindashvili and Maia Chiburdanidze had gained the title earlier by special judgment of the World Chess Federation)

27 year old: Susan becomes the first person ever to win the chess Triple Crown (the rapid, blitz, and classical world championships)

Sofia Polgár:  (born November 2, 1974)

5 years old: Sofia wins the under-eleven Hungarian championship for girls

11 years old: Sofia wins the gold medal for girls at the under-fourteen championships

14 years old: Sofia wins eight straight games in the Magistrale di Roma against many of the greatest players including GMs such as Alexander Chernin , Semon Palatnik , and Yuri Razuvaev .  (This is a record performance in chess history based on an Elo performance rating over 2900).

Judit Polgár:  (born July 23, 1976)

5 years old : Judit  was able to defeat a family friend without looking at the board

7 years old : Judit played two games of blindfold chess against two masters and won

9 years old : Judit played in her first rated tournament in the U.S., finishing first in the unrated section of the New York Open, winning US$1,000.

10 years old: Judit defeats an International Master Dolfi Drimer

11 years old : Judit defeats Grand Master Lev Gutman

12 years old: Judit became t he youngest ever player to break into the World Chess Federation Top 100 players rating list with a ranking of No. 55;

12 years old and 3 months : Judit  became the youngest ever International Master ( Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov were 14 when they were awarded the title)

15 years and 4 months old :  Judit became the youngest ever Grandmaster beating Bobby Fischer’s record

25 years old: Judit  beats Garry Kasporov (the #1 player in the world at the time) in 42 moves

28 years old:  Judit became the first, and to date only, woman to have surpassed 2700 Elo, reaching a career peak rating of 2735 and peak ranking of No. 8 in the world

Conclusion: 

The success of the Polgar sisters cannot be explained on the basis of inheriting high IQ genes from their parents.  High IQ parents are in existence across the globe yet László' was able to produce the only family in history where all daughters were ranked in the top ten of female chess players in the world -- an astronomically low probability event on the basis of chance alone.

What overall conclusions can be drawn based on the science?

The kind of training that  Lászlo did with his daughters is largely classified today as  deliberate practice and  studies have shown that it may explain 26 percent of the variation for games such as chess, 21 percent for music, and 18 percent for sports .

Therefore the science shows that deliberate practice does not explain all or even most of the performance variation in these fields (on average).  Rather a multi-factorial model of expertise development that includes genetics and the  age at which an individual starts an activity  (amongst other variables) is at play.

About Didactiic

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Didactiic aims to be a "Waze for parenting" in that it will show you how to bring your child from point A to point B through day-to-day activities you can do with your child across the following dimensions: comprehension skills, language skills, math skills, memory skills, motor skills, visual-spatial skills and overall cognition skills.

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Published May 29, 2018

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What do people know about the method Lazlo Polgar used on his daughters?

I can't remember how long ago this was but I caught something on 9gag about a man name Lazlo Polgar that emphasized mastering a skill to his daughters.

Apparently, they're now famous in the chess world for not only being some of the very best but also noticeable "normal" and "ok" which I take as something that's not common among the elites.

Does anybody know anything specifically about how he raised his daughters? It sounds like a super interesting story but I can't find anything on it

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