Recently I visited Churchlands Senior High School and I was astonished to find out that a group of students have self-organised a Go club after school hours from 3.30 pm on Tuesdays. The spontaneous Go club is organised by young Go players who visit the Go club session on Saturday at Tzu Chi.
The group is attended by about a dozen students, who are self-thought, and practice using donated books from Clive Hunt on small Korean –made boards from, kindly sent from Australian Go Federation. The group was supervised by their Mathematics teacher, who was interested in the logical and consequential skill –development of the game and its application in science. However, after his long-service leave, there is no one to replace him, and the student group is continuing unsupervised.
This remarkable student-led initiative is an example of a need for young people to learn new types of skills, which are equally applicable in all fields of science. The students are sharing that playing Go has helped them to increase their patience, marks in school and to develop new frame of thinking, which has led to improved results in their formal studies.
A potential exist for Churchlands Senior High School (and other schools) to tap on the self-generated interest in Go from their students to pursue excellence, honesty and trustworthiness by introducing formal lessons of Go within the curriculum with an experienced teacher.
This would allow for the next generations of Go educators to carry on thousands-year old tradition into the modern classrooms of 21ST century.