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 two of them becoming the best and second best women chess players in the world.

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.

Polgár studied intelligence when he was a university student. He later recalled that "when I looked at the life stories of geniuses" during his student years, "I found the same thing....They all started at a very young age and studied intensively." He prepared for fatherhood prior to marriage, reported People Magazine in 1987, by studying the biographies of 400 great intellectuals, from Socrates to Einstein. He concluded that if he took the right approach to child-rearing, he could turn "any healthy newborn" into "a genius." In 1992, Polgár told the Washington Post: "A genius is not born but is educated and trained….When a child is born healthy, it is a potential genius."

In 1965 Polgár "conducted an epistolary courtship with a Ukrainian foreign language teacher named Klara." In his letters, he outlined the pedagogical project he had in mind. In reading those biographies, he had "identified a common theme—early and intensive specialization in a particular subject." Certain that "he could turn any healthy child into a prodigy," he "needed a wife willing to jump on board."

He and Klara married in the USSR, whereupon she moved to Hungary to be with him. They had three daughters together, whom Polgár home-schooled, primarily in chess but also in Esperanto, German, Russian, English, and high-level math. Polgár and his wife considered various possible subjects in which to drill their children, "including mathematics and foreign languages," but they settled on chess. "We could do the same thing with any subject, if you start early, spend lots of time and give great love to that one subject," Klara later explained. "But we chose chess. Chess is very objective and easy to measure." Susan described chess as having been her own choice: "Yes, he could have put us in any field, but it was I who chose chess as a four-year-old.... I liked the chessmen; they were toys for me."

...
Wikipedia