English Chess Forum

I thought I'd take advantage of the new government e-petition thing and start a petition to add chess to the school curriculum. If we want to serious improve chess in this country, then dramatically increasing the number of children who play is no bad thing. It worked for Russia!

Please sign it here: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/15863

Also I know George Osborne, for one, is a chess fan. He has talked about following Kasparov & Karpov in interviews.

Martin

"Also I know George Osborne, for one, is a chess fan. He has talked about following Kasparov & Karpov in interviews."

I had not heard this before, but here he is at the London Chess Classic

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7372

Matthew Turner wrote:"Also I know George Osborne, for one, is a chess fan. He has talked about following Kasparov & Karpov in interviews."

I had not heard this before, but here he is at the London Chess Classic

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7372

Yeah, he was there on one of the days on the weekend. You knew there was something up because Malcolm was running around everywhere to get as many people as possible to fill up the auditorium for start of play

Anyone have links to the interviews? I Googled but didn't find them. I did, along the way, find this:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style ... 07898.html

An article from 10 July 2011, from 'The Independent' titled: 'Transcendental Meditation: Were the hippies right all along?' Includes a mention of Jonathan Rowson. Well, two mentions actually:

- "TM reaches far into the rational and sceptical world, too; the American philosopher Daniel Dennett does it, as does Dr Jonathan Rowson, head of the Social Brain project at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) and a chess grandmaster"

- The aforementioned Dr Rowson, who was British chess champion from 2004 to 2006, has been practising TM for 14 years. "I'd say that TM is physiologically very powerful, and spiritually a bit shallow," he says. "There are few things better for giving you a feeling of serenity, energy and balance. But I don't think it gives you any particular insight into your own mind."

But maybe this is going a bit off-topic for a thread on putting chess on the school curriculum.

Matthew Turner wrote:"Also I know George Osborne, for one, is a chess fan. He has talked about following Kasparov & Karpov in interviews."

I had not heard this before, but here he is at the London Chess Classic

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7372

Osborne said that in an interview in The Times ... Which is probably why you can't google it