From the moment the child lands on the ground, almost all parents will have good expectations for their children, hoping to cultivate an excellent child, hoping that the child can have outstanding talents in a certain aspect and make achievements beyond ordinary people.
I hope that my child is a genius prodigy, how many parents secretly think like this? However, there are not many parents who really consciously cultivate their children to become "prodigies" through various efforts, and it is even rarer that all children in a family can cultivate the world's top talents in a certain field.
There is such a father, before the birth of his child, he plans to do an experiment to train his children to become geniuses, and he really did it. This experiment is the "Polgar Experiment", and the "Polgar Three Sisters" in the "Polgar Experiment" are legends in the chess world, and the fame in the chess world is too big.
Therefore, the "Polgar experiment" has also become a topic often mentioned in pedagogical and psychological research.
Let's first see how amazing these three sisters are.
1. They have not gone to school for a day, have not received a school education, but have their parents teach their knowledge at home.
2. They are all teenagers who have achieved great results in chess competitions in their teens.
Boss Susan. Polgar, who won her first title at the age of 4, became a world-class chess player at the age of 15 and became the world's first female international grandmaster at the age of 21. Old two Sophia. Polga, who won the men's division of the national competition at the age of 7 and the world championship of the men's division at the age of 14. Its chess rating score was ranked sixth in the world. Old Three Judit. Polgar became an international grandmaster at the age of 15, the youngest international grandmaster at the time, and ranked first in the world women's chess for 26 consecutive years, once selected in the Guinness Book of World Records, and is recognized as the strongest female chess player of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The third is known as Polgar Jr., and her achievements in the chess world have not yet been surpassed by female chess players. After her retirement, she was appointed head coach of the Hungarian men's chess team.
3) The point is that they are all three sisters, not just one of them.
Therefore, the story of their talents has become a topic of interest to many people, and the American best-selling book "The Power of Character" also mentions the three Polgar sisters and their father's "Polgar Experiment" to train them.
The parents of the three sisters experimented with their own children.
The father of the three Polgar sisters was named Laszlo. Polga, a Hungarian psychologist, was very interested in behaviorist psychology and firmly believed in the theories of behaviorist psychology.
Behaviorist psychology is a traditional school of psychology whose founder was the notorious Watson, who experimented with babies, and behaviorist psychology believes that the environment is the most important force in children's development, and adults can shape children's behavior through control and stimulation.
In other words, what you want your child to become can be achieved through training.
Laszlo. Ball deepened his belief in this, and in the 1960s he published his research in the book The Cultivation of Genius, arguing that parents could raise their children into geniuses, and that the sooner they trained, the easier it would be to succeed. But at that time, he was still a single young man, not married, and did not have children, so there was no practice in theory, and he wanted to experiment through his own children and test his theory.
He wrote to his girlfriend Clara to explain his ambitious plan, and Clara supported his idea, and after they got married, they began to implement his prodigy development program, known as the "Polgar Experiment".
To say that the couple was also strange enough, Laszlo dared to experiment with his own children, and his wife dared to agree.
Let's take a look at Laszlo. What the Polgars did.
1. Do not let your children go to school and teach them at home.
This reduces the impact of the outside environment on the experiment and makes their goals more focused.
2. Chess training for three children from an early age, and up to 8-10 hours a day.
Laszlo believes that only after enough diligence can a child be trained to be a genius, which is also in line with the law of ten thousand hours, and to become an expert in a certain field, it takes ten thousand hours of training. Laszlo trained his three daughters for 8-10 hours a day, some say 5-6 hours, in short, a lot of training.
In fact, all the top chess players have gone through a long, almost devilish practice to excel in this field.
Chess world champion Gata. Like the Polgar sisters, Kamski grew up without going to school, watching television, and studying chess for up to 14 hours a day at the behest of his father (veritable devilish training).
3. Not only the training of chess skills, but also the training of psychological quality.
Chess, like other chess sports, is a game of chess, in this process, the situation on the chessboard may change at any time, so the psychological quality of chess players is very important, once in the inferior situation, it will lose faster, on the contrary, if you deal with it calmly, you may also lose into victory.
The players who win the game are all focused, confident, determined, have super psychological qualities, and playing chess is a kind of enjoyment for them, they enjoy it, rather than being suffered by training. As a psychologist, László knows how to train his daughter and wants to become an international master, far from playing chess well.
What made the Polgar sisters successful? Is it the father's training?
The legend of the three Polgar sisters has become a topic of discussion not only in the chess world, but also in psychology and pedagogy.
Is the success of the three sisters due to the crazy training of their parents? Can the "Polgar Experiment" be replicated in other families and children?
According to the theory of behaviorist psychology, children can be molded and success can be copied, but research in developmental psychology has found that a person's development is far from simple, but very complex.
The lifelong development concept believes that the development of the individual is affected by a variety of factors, including the innate IQ factor of the individual, as well as the quality of parenting of the parents of the child, the resources and opportunities available to the parents, and the social support.
Ecosystem theory also holds that human development is influenced by multi-level environments, and the end result is the result of innate personality and environmental interactions. That is to say, what kind of person is born, what kind of advantages they have, whether the environment for growth is beneficial, and whether personality and environment interact to promote development or are not conducive to development.
Specific to the Three Sisters of Polgar, it is also consistent with the study of developmental psychology.
One is that the three Polgar sisters have the genes to play chess well.
It is said that their father, Laszlo. Polga also plays chess well, so the three sisters also love to play chess. When Lászlo observed what her daughter liked, she found that the eldest daughter was interested in chess, so she embarked on the path of training her and her sister to become chess "prodigies", and they really liked to play chess, and if they did not love it, it was difficult to persevere and achieve great success.
Second, the parents provided an environment for the three sisters to develop chess.
There should be many natural enthusiasts, but those who can be at the top of the industry are always a minority. The reason why the three Polgar sisters can become legends lies in the excellent growth environment created by their parents: a learning environment without distractions and undisturbed, a long period of training, etc.
The third is the concentration on the goal and a lot of training.
Mr. and Mrs. Laszlo's goal for their daughter is very clear, that is, to build their daughter into a chess "genius", and the three sisters obviously regard their parents' goals as their own goals, focus on the goals, and add a lot of training, so the achievements of the three sisters in the chess world are also logical.
Of course, any success is inseparable from focus and hard work, for our ordinary parents and ordinary children, even if we do not expect our children to become geniuses, it is equally important to discover their interests and cultivate the character of children's hard work.
The enlightenment given to us by the three Polgar sisters is not to copy the growth path of the "prodigy", but any harvest requires a lot of effort.