Chess is to be made a compulsory subject in Spanish schools. There is cross-party agreement that the move is a good one, with the Socialist party MP who proposed it claiming the game “improves memory and strategic capacity, teaches students to make decisions under high pressure and develops concentration”.

Spain will not be the first country to build chess into the curriculum. Armenia long ago made it a core subject, with startling results for its national chess strength – they have won three of the past five Olympiads, an amazing result for so small a nation pitted against the might of chess superpowers such as Russia, China and the US.

Former world champion Garry Kasparov wrote a book, How Life Imitates Chess, arguing that chess is an “ideal instrument” for developing effective decision-making. “What am I lacking? What are my strengths? What types of challenges do I tend to avoid and why?” These are the questions you have to answer in life, as in chess, he insisted. We will for the moment ignore the fact that Kasparov has largely failed to transfer his chess genius to the greater (and far more dangerous) game of Russian politics.

Jonathan Rowson, the former British champion and an immensely thoughtful writer on chess (and much else besides), has gone even further than Kasparov, describing chess as the rock on which he founded his early life. “I don’t want to pour out too much of my soul,” he wrote in his column (now sadly defunct) in the Herald newspaper, “but things happened in my childhood that I was too young to make sense of at the time, and recently it has become clear to me just how essential chess was to my survival. Sublimation is the technical psychological term. Chess gave me a way to channel difficult emotions into something creative and constructive.”

The forerunner of all this chess-for-life thinking was the 18th-century American writer, inventor and statesman Benjamin Franklin, a keen (though by all accounts not very capable) player, who in his essay The Morals of Chess argued that the game was good for the soul. “Chess is not merely an idle amusement,” he wrote. “Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired or strengthened by it, so as to become habits, ready on all occasions. For life is a kind of chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events that are, in some degree, the effects of prudence or the want of it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anatoly Karpov, left, defending world chess champion, and challenger Garry Kasparov, both of the Soviet Union, at the World Chess finals in Moscow, 1984. Photograph: Anonymous/AP

Plenty of distinguished observers have, however, reached the opposite conclusion, contending that chess, a quietly vicious game in which you are trying to obliterate your opponent, can produce monsters. Mostly, they were thinking about Bobby Fischer, the American genius who quit school at 16 to concentrate on chess and became world champion at 29. “Chess is war over the board,” said Fischer. “The object is to crush the opponent’s mind. I like the moment when I break a man’s ego.” These are not pleasant lessons, yet they created a player who has claims to be called the greatest of all time.

Arthur Koestler, who admitted he was a “passionate duffer” where chess was concerned, reported for the Sunday Times on the great match between Fischer and the then reigning world champion Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972. He was struck by the double-sidedness of chess, calling it the “perfect paradigm for both the glory and the bloodiness of the human mind”.

George Steiner was in Reykjavik, too, covering the match for the New Yorker. His verdict was even less generous than Koestler’s. Not content merely to conclude that chess was ultimately pointless, he argued that devoting one’s formidable mental attributes to a pastime was almost guaranteed to lead to insanity. “A chess genius is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labours on an ultimately trivial human enterprise,” he wrote. “Almost inevitably, this focus produces pathological symptoms of nervous stress and unreality.” The irascible, unpredictable, at times out-of-control Fischer was of course uppermost in his mind.

I have been studying chess (and chess players) for the past three years, for a book to be published in 2016. I can see both points of view. The game does force you to think, analyse, rationalise, apply logic. But it also drives you a little bit crazy. The deeper you go into it, the more you realise your limitations. The “truth”, as chess players like to term it, of a position is all too often elusive. After playing a game (especially if I lose), I will sometimes lie awake in bed for hours playing through the game in my head. The pain of chess generally outweighs the pleasure.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bobby Fischer at the US chess championship tournament in New York in 1965. Photograph: JK/AP

Many claims are made for chess – that it is art, science and sport all rolled into one. Well, maybe. We players who devote thousands of hours to it have to believe we are engaged in some higher endeavour. But again I’m not sure it’s really true. I like it mainly because it’s a glorious waste of time, a way of cocking a snook at the workaday world. Some chess professionals in the UK get by on £12,000 a year – grandmasters earning less for creating beautiful games than they would make stacking shelves. But they reason that they are beating the system. Many chess players are loners, outsiders, rebels. The board is their world; the place they are most at home.

For me the Dutch grandmaster and chess columnist Hein Donner – the model for the character of Onno Quist in Harry Mulisch’s novel The Discovery of Heaven – came closest to getting to the essence (or perhaps non-essence) of chess. He addressed the art v game, profound endeavour v complete waste of time question in a column published in 1959. “A chess player produces nothing, creates nothing,” Donner concluded in his usual emphatic style. “He only has one aim: the destruction of his opponent.”

Chess, Donner insisted, is a struggle, a fight to the death. “When one of the two players has imposed his will on the other and can at last begin to be freely creative, the game is over. That is the moment when, among masters, the opponent resigns. That is why chess is not art. No, chess cannot be compared with anything. Many things can be compared with chess, but chess is only chess.” A wonderful game, but a most peculiar preparation for life, whatever Benjamin Franklin, Garry Kasparov and Spanish parliamentarians might tell you.