Genius Incubator: The Story of the Sister Grandmasters Polgar
Dmitry Kurkin
What makes a man a genius? What are the reasons for our talents - heredity or the notorious ten thousand hours of practice (according to the sociologist Malcolm Gladwell, it’s just what a person needs to become a professional in his field)? Half a century ago, the Hungarian teacher Laszlo Polgar began a long-term experiment on growing geniuses in a single family. The results of this experiment, as unique, just as controversial, became sensational and in passing broke the age-old prejudice about the "inferiority" of the female intellect. But do they prove what Polgar insisted on in the first place - that outstanding abilities are not predetermined by nature, but can be cultivated in the right environment, like an incubator with a special training regime?
Laszlo Polgar became interested in the phenomenon of genius in the mid-sixties, studying the development of human intelligence in the university. Having studied the biographies of about four hundred prominent personalities, he concluded that the talents of people like Mozart and Gauss are the result of methodical studies started at an early age, and not a gain in genetic roulette. According to the teacher, who he formulated in the monograph "How to raise a genius," you can grow a wunderkind from almost any healthy child - you need to start working with him before he turns three years old, and from the age of six years decide on a specialization.
It remained to confirm the theory with practice, and Polgar began to look for the mother of future geniuses, whom he intended to educate himself. To do this, according to the legend, he placed an ad in a magazine, to which Clara Altberger, a Soviet teacher from Transcarpathia with German and Hungarian roots, soon responded. After six years of acquaintance and active correspondence, the couple married in the USSR and moved to Budapest, where they had three daughters: Jujanna (Zhuzha), Sophia and Judit. Pedagogical experiment began.
According to eyewitnesses, the close apartment of Polgarov in the workers' quarter of Budapest was littered with books on chess theory, but this didn’t bother the girls at all. There are various explanations for why parents chose chess when choosing a specialization. Strictly speaking, they taught their children both foreign languages (all three sisters became polyglots) and mathematics. But the rating of polyglots and mathematicians does not exist - unlike the Elo chess rating, which made it possible to more clearly evaluate the success of children. On the other hand, the sisters themselves confidently say that they themselves chose chess. One does not contradict the other, and it seems that Polgar Sr. managed to kindle interest in the game in children, and gamification played a significant role in this: Zhuzha recalls that chess figures became her favorite toys.
Although studying at the Polgarov house was devoted almost all the time, from morning to evening (four hours are required for chess), Laszlo did not believe in compulsion and cane discipline and considered it important to maintain sincere enthusiasm in children. The sense of reward from victory should have been many times greater than the disappointment of defeat, and the desire to win - to be stronger than the fear of possible loss. It worked: in Tedov's 2016 lecture, Judith Polgar, known for her aggressive style of play, says that she loved to compete from an early age.
The sense of reward from victory should have been many times greater than disappointment from defeat, and the desire to win - to be stronger than the fear of losing.
Contemporaries looked askance at Polgar's pedagogical methods, suspecting in him of a mentally ill patient who stole childhood from children for an ethically questionable experiment (household anti-Semitism was often mixed with these suspicions). In order to defend the right to home schooling for the eldest daughter - Zhuzha, by her seven years, had already studied the elementary school program, he had to endure a protracted bureaucratic war with the Hungarian Ministry of Education. In addition, the supervisory authorities from time to time organized raids on the apartment Polgarov, and the head of the Chess Federation of Hungary and party leader Sandor Seregni called the father of the family "a bastard and anarchist." “People said:“ Parents kill them, they have to work all day, they have no childhood at all ”,” Judit recalled. She herself, like her sisters, never questioned the upbringing chosen by her parents.
The Hungarian authorities loosened their grip only when the Polgarov method finally began to bring visual results: at the age of ten, Zhuzha created a national sensation, successfully speaking at the adult chess championship of the country, and the news of incredible children gradually began to change public opinion. However, this did not make it easier to break into the chess establishment, which in those years remained a closed men's club, where terry sexism flourished. It was believed that women by nature are not able to play on the same level with men, and the fact that no woman by that time had received the title of grandmaster seemed to reinforce the gender stereotype.
For Polgarov it was a great challenge. Laszlo forbade daughters to play in women's tournaments and insisted that they compete with the strongest possible rivals. To do this, sometimes you had to play "blindly" - and only after the matches the master chess players on the other side of the board were surprised to learn that they were beaten by a nine or eleven year old girl. It should be noted that at this stage Polgar was no longer a diplomatic father: American chess player and politician Sam Sloan recalled how, in his eyes, Laszlo reprimanded Judit for the fact that she agreed to a draw, playing with the 223rd number in the FIDE rating, and most lowered its own rating factor. According to Sloan, it would have been a miracle for Judith to draw that game, but Laslo could not appreciate it, since he himself was a mediocre chess player.
But no matter how strong the prejudices against the "female intellect" were, it was impossible to ignore the level of the Polgar sisters. Zhuzha confirmed the title of master by the age of thirteen, the international master by eighteen, and the grandmaster by twenty one. Sophia became a grandmaster at fourteen, Judit at thirteen, thus beating Bobby Fisher. The latter circumstance gave her particular pleasure, because the former wonder-boy of American chess was a famous woman-hater and in 1963 declared that women "play monstrously": "I think they are just not very clever ... They should do household chores, but not intellectual ".
It was believed that women are naturally not able to play on the same level with men, and the absence of women grandmasters reinforced the stereotype
The success of the Polgar sisters became a serious argument in favor of the theory of their father, but the question he tried to answer remains open. Three examples, even exceptional ones, are, by the standards of science, an insignificant sample, which cannot be considered an unequivocal proof of the correctness of Polgar. Especially when we do not have reliable statistics on how many such experiments on growing champions have failed. In addition, genetic studies confirm that, at least, mathematical ability and ear for music are actually encoded in human DNA and are inherited.
At the same time, there is a sound grain in the Polgar theory: it fairly accurately indicated the age at which to start training, and the age for choosing specialization. According to the theory of information processing proposed by cognitive psychologists at about the same time that Polgar published his monograph on the education of geniuses, from two to five years a person has a long-term memory, as well as the first analytical abilities: recognizing previously learned information, focusing on which -or task and find different ways to solve it. From five to seven years, metacognitive skills are added to them, that is, the ability to "think about how we think" and "talk about how we argue."
The fears of the contemporaries of Polgarov, who believed that they thoughtlessly maimed the psyche of their children, were not justified. They were not so obsessed with their experiment, as it was considered: when the Dutch billionaire, impressed with the successes of Zuja Polgar, offered them a fee to repeat the experience, adopting three boys from economically disadvantaged countries, the couple refused. And although outstanding chess players do have problems with socialization, the specific upbringing did not prevent the Polgar sisters from becoming those who are called "harmonious personalities", whose life is not limited to chess. As Judit explained at the same Tedov lecture, from memory reproducing the game played against Anatoly Karpov about thirty years ago, chess became for her just one more perfectly learned language.
PHOTO:Wikimedia, juditpolgar