THE THREAT OF DEWEY'S PROGRESSIVISM

To understand the choices Chalmers made on the committee that formulated the Advanced Placement program, we need to situate him within the broader debates about education and democracy in which he participated. Throughout the 1930s, John Dewey was the nation's foremost theorist of education. His philosophy was pragmatic: education should aid in the development of democratic attitudes by “simplifying and ordering the factors of the disposition it is wished to develop; purifying and idealizing the existing social customs; creating a wider and better balanced environment than that by which the young would be likely, if left to themselves, to be influenced.”Footnote ⁴ For Dewey, notions of “class authority” were inseparable from both the structure and the content of the system. A proponent of social justice, Dewey advocated for the amelioration of inequities through education, taking seriously the notion that it is “the aim of progressive education to take part in correcting unfair privilege and unfair deprivation, not to perpetuate them.”Footnote ⁵ For Dewey, “democracy” meant greater social and economic equality among citizens and protection from the depredations of elites in all realms of American life, not just in politics.

Dewey's understanding of how to best combat inequity and his class consciousness extended to his philosophies about the teaching and transmission of culture. In his view, democracy relied on communication among and between individuals, and he admitted that “cultivation” brought with it “greater promise for a social service which goes beyond the supply in quantity of material commodities.”Footnote ⁶ He hoped to reconcile individualistic and collective goals for educational systems, as when he wrote, “it is the particular task of education at the present time to struggle in behalf of an aim in which social efficiency and personal culture are synonyms instead of antagonists.”Footnote ⁷ But he was wary of teaching “aristocratic” cultural traditions and texts that “represented the intellectual and moral outlook of the class which was in direct social control.”Footnote ⁸ Dewey proposed balancing studies of literature with an understanding of the working conditions of the cultures that had produced the works under discussion. What we might now call his historicist lens was also part of his pragmatism: understanding the work in context could help students to see cultural products as part of a whole social organism.

In 1935, Dewey published a critique of liberalism, painting the framework as fractured and outdated. He warned about liberals’ lack of awareness of “the historic relativity of … interpretation[s] of the meaning of liberty,” and argued that, in fighting absolutism, liberals had the tendency to mistakenly become too fixed themselves in the meaning of such concepts. In the revolutionary era,

Wary of adherence to a tradition that no longer suited the nation's needs, Dewey called for a new kind of liberalism, emphasizing “[o]rganized social planning, put into effect for the creation of an order in which industry and finance are socially directed in behalf of institutions that provide the material basis for the cultural liberation and growth of individuals.”Footnote ¹⁰ To some, what Dewey called “the sole method of social action by which liberalism can realize its professed aims” sounded a lot like socialism.

By the 1940s and 1950s, some critics took Dewey's definition of liberalism, his insistence on ameliorating injustice, and his focus on pragmatism as more threatening to democracy than in alignment with it. Concern about the atheism, collectivism, and dehumanization attendant to communism led conservative commentators like Mortimer Smith, an education writer, to complain that, for Dewey, education was too instrumental. Smith disagreed with what he took to be an anti-intellectual notion that the value of metaphysical thought must be rooted in the present, that “there are no ultimates or any universal, timeless human values” worth studying on their own terms.Footnote ¹¹

Contemporaneously to the rise of critics like Smith, Harvard's James Conant began advocating for a reorientation of the national education system as an instrument for producing a meritocratic elite. Contra Dewey, Conant insisted on the preservation of liberal education to achieve this end. Conant appreciated Dewey's dedication to education as a serious philosophical problem, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s Conant's understandings of liberalism and democracy diverged from Dewey's. Conant advocated a Jeffersonian scheme for sorting the nation's students according to academic ability, and believed, for the sake of classical liberalism and democracy, in the cultivation of a class of maximally rational experts.Footnote ¹² A trained chemist, Conant took special interest in the promotion of science and the social sciences as means of navigating both capitalism and the nuclear age. But he wanted these disciplines to be understood in the context of a broader liberal-arts scheme. He advocated for the early identification and special handling of “gifted” students who might make especially significant contributions to the nation's safety and prosperity.Footnote ¹³ Conant's ideas about restructuring the system garnered praise from professional educators and gained popular appeal. His insistence on technocratic stratification for the sake of producing a well-educated elite paved the way for broad acceptance of the Advanced Placement program.Footnote ¹⁴

LOCATING CHALMERS AS COLD WAR CONSERVATIVE

In the middle of the 1950s, Chalmers received acclaim from peers whose reputations would go on to eclipse his own. Conant's program for education reform was less explicitly partisan than some of his contemporaries’. In “The American Conservative Character,” Russell Kirk listed Chalmers and his book-length study of American education, The Republic and the Person, as part of a cohort of thinkers and works marking a watershed moment in the conservative intellectual movement, alongside works like Daniel Boorstin's The Genius of American Politics and Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences.Footnote ¹⁵ Later that year, in Literature and the American College, Kirk put Chalmers in the company of Harvard president Nathan Pusey as a “leading college administrator.”Footnote ¹⁶ The next year, Peter Vierick's Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill identified Chalmers as “slightly older” than the emerging cohort of “New Conservatives,” instead placing him in a group of cultural critics “generally Burkean in approach.”Footnote ¹⁷

Recent scholars of mid-century conservatism's evolution have not agreed on Chalmers's relevance to the tradition. Even within the more expansive historical accounting of the political right's intellectual development now available, it is difficult to locate Gordon Keith Chalmers among his influences, contemporaries, and students. George Nash cited Chalmers as an intellectual contemporary of Richard Weaver, whose humanism bore the influence of the Southern Agrarians, and as a critic of Dewey like Arthur Bestor and Mortimer Smith.Footnote ¹⁸ Despite Nash's grouping of him with conservative education thinkers, Chalmers does not appear in Andrew Hartman's more recent account of conservatism's role in shaping Cold War education.Footnote ¹⁹ Nor does he have a place in Patrick Allitt's survey of twentieth-century American conservatism.Footnote ²⁰ Despite the lack of uniform recognition as a thinker who shaped conservatism, Chalmers's impact still resonates. His publications may have played a minor part in intellectual conservative history, but in the words of Richard Weaver, his ideas had major consequences for the history of American education.

Looking at Chalmers's key intellectual influences will be useful in understanding his work as part of a constellation of thinkers emerging in the middle of the twentieth century. In 1953, Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind, now a touchstone for traditionalist conservatives. In a New York Times review, Chalmers celebrated it as a “brilliant and eloquent” articulation of an “affirmative tradition of Burke, de Tocqueville, and Irving Babbitt.” The book helped Chalmers to conceptualize himself as a thinker in a long line of humanistic “independent lovers of liberty throughout the past century of expanding democratic collectivism,” not merely as a reactionary anticommunist.Footnote ²¹ Kirk advocated for the study of “serious poetry” as a means to see past the “ideological dogmas of this century,” and to “reinterpret and vindicate the norms of human existence.”Footnote ²² These notions are embedded in a worldview committed simultaneously and paradoxically to both elitism and Christian insistence on universal individual dignity.

In keeping with this worldview, Kirk held specific ideas about how universities and, more particularly, humanities departments should function. He expected campuses to enrich students’ lives by divorcing education from the expectation of financial reward. By promoting comfort with fluidity and humanism, Kirk hoped that schools would expand America's capacity for self-governance while reducing dependence on the kind of mechanization he equated with soullessness. Left unchecked, mechanization and industrialization would enslave Americans. In the Christian mold, Kirk saw the liberal arts as a path towards redemption and liberation.

Chalmers also kept company with and synthesized the thoughts of other conservative thinkers, including John Crowe Ransom, now best known as the leading advocate for New Criticism and as the founder of the Kenyon Review. In 1930, Ransom published a defense of Southern Agrarianism entitled I'll Take My Stand, in which he painted progress as a threat to humanism: “The intention of Americans at large appears now to be what it was always in danger of becoming: an intention of being infinitely progressive. But this intention cannot permit of an established order of human existence, and of that leisure which conditions the life of intelligence and the arts.”Footnote ²³ Although Ransom moved away from his early conservative views, throughout his career he remained defensive about the maintenance of culture in an industrial age. In 1937, Chalmers hired Ransom to pursue multiple projects geared towards protection of “culture.” Ransom envisioned a literary theory that would, as Kirk believed reading should, get at hard, universal truths about the human spirit, but he was markedly less sentimental about the project. In Ransom's essay “Criticism, Inc.” – widely credited with bringing New Criticism to prominence – he insisted, “Criticism must become more scientific, or precise and systematic.” The essay details his concerns about historicism eclipsing literary study and science obscuring its value. In an effort to protect English departments and to help professors and their students “define and enjoy the aesthetic or characteristic values of literature,” he proposed that criticism “shall be objective, shall cite the nature of the object rather than its effects upon the subject.”Footnote ²⁴ Contra Dewey, Ransom hoped to shift students’ attention away from a work's context and towards some inherent, enduring, aesthetic meaning.

CHALMERS, THE REPUBLIC, AND THE PERSON

Writing into the ongoing national conversation about the purpose of American schooling, Chalmers understood education as a political problem. His sense of the challenges confronting American education and his attendant proposals and recommendations were informed by and helped to shape his conceptions of democracy and liberty. Andrew Hartman wrote of mid-century education reform, “As Americans variously experienced the crisis of the Cold War as a crisis in education, both consciously and subconsciously, the schools, in turn, facilitated the construction of ‘cold warriors’ conditioned to fear and loathe Communism, the Soviet Union, and more nebulously, leftist ideas in general.”Footnote ²⁵ Like many of his contemporaries, including Kirk and Ransom, Chalmers was indeed obsessed with how to best mount an ideological attack against anti-American thought structures.

In The Republic and the Person (1952), Chalmers warned about ruinous repercussions for what he understood to have been the disintegration of American liberalism during the 1920s and 1930s. He aimed to reorient education from Deweyan pragmatism towards the production of “responsible American liberalism of a kind adequate to our obligations abroad and at home.”Footnote ²⁶ With clarity and conviction, he continued, “all provision for order and common welfare must not only avoid violating the rights of the individual but must positively serve the maximum opportunity for the individual to exercise his civil rights.” Chalmers revisited what, over a decade earlier, Louis Mumford warned was a developing “disintegrated” American liberalism. Mumford argued that during the Second World War, liberalism's tendency towards moral equivocation, its insistence on dispassionate rationality and debate, and its dismissal of emotion prohibited the nation's timely attendance “to the overwhelming duty of the moment, in a spirit of clear-sighted understanding.” Mumford worried, “In a disintegrating world, pragmatic liberalism has lost its integrity but retained its limitations.”Footnote ²⁷ Chalmers understood restoring integrity to liberalism as a necessary goal for American education given the nation's postwar vulnerability to alien ideology.

Chalmers knew that he was not alone among university leaders in reconsidering the relationship between education and democracy in the face of the communist threat, but he did not wholly agree with the loudest of college presidents. In the penultimate chapter of The Republic and the Person, he engaged explicitly with Harvard president James Bryant Conant's increasingly popular solution to the preservation of democracy – using the national system of education to realize a technocratic national order, in which rational leaders would make political decisions with profound moral implications on the basis of statistics and social science. Chalmers argued that, in Education in a Divided World, Conant had misunderstood the point of studying language, literature, and history.Footnote ²⁸ In addition to a public equipped to read editorials and form what Walter Lippman, borrowing from Jefferson and Madison, called “public opinion,” Chalmers imagined a kind of secondary education that would teach students “how to think responsibly and fruitfully about our nature in order that we may not only understand but fulfill the urgent request of our friends abroad that America provide the world with moral leadership.”Footnote ²⁹ In his view, “mastery of the humane knowledge necessary for liberal and democratic government” should “stand at the center of the objectives of higher education; every device and plan, for the schools as well as the universities, should be made in the light of it.”Footnote ³⁰ Conant understood humanistic study as a source of pleasure and enrichment, whereas Chalmers believed that broadening access to a sophisticated, firm understanding of “human nature” was central to restoring integrity to liberalism, and, in turn, to saving democracy.

Chalmers's simultaneous devotion to Protestantism and his position of power within the academy demanded reckoning with God and Man at Yale (1951), William F. Buckley's politicized crusade on academic freedom.Footnote ³¹ Chalmers understood school as a microcosm of the kind of community he hoped to promulgate throughout the country and devoted a chapter in The Republic and the Person to arguing in favor of incorporating Protestant worship into collegiate life as an antidote to both New Deal collectivism and the moral relativism emerging from the Second World War. In the fashion of other conservative thinkers, he worried that “the theological ignorance of American humane learning has contributed to ethical ignorance and moral decline.”Footnote ³² But in a direct refutation of Buckley's polemic about academic freedom as a superstition that would undermine religious life in America, Chalmers wrote,

He continued, “For while it is true that throughout the ages and at present there has been earnest disagreement about these ultimates, it is also true that belief in their existence is of paramount importance to all men.”Footnote ³³ Chalmers understood responsible citizenship – and the education attendant to it – as both intellectually liberal and guided by faith in morality.

In articles and essays, Chalmers expounded on his positions pertaining to the relationship between liberalism and the best system of education to sustain it. Echoing Ransom's call for professionalized, serious attention to reading habits, Chalmers repeatedly denounced “relaxed, friendly, sentimental, and humanitarian education,” blaming it as both a symptom and a cause of “our unwillingness as a people to discipline ourselves.”Footnote ³⁴ He mocked the nation's lack of intellectual preparedness to fend off the Soviet Union's un-Christian ideological threat: “Having gone to school in institutions which are boyish, relaxed, imprecise, and sentimental, we are acting like boys in the face of intellectualized evil.”Footnote ³⁵ Like Ransom, Chalmers advocated instead for a mode of reading that uncovered hard truths. The aim was not to reform or expand democracy in the progressive sense, but to protect constitutionalism and uphold high intellectual standards. Chalmers envisioned masses comprising individuals with the autonomy to self-govern according to the strictures of the nation's founding documents.

While Chalmers did acknowledge and celebrate the social progress arising from Dewey's efforts at reform, he wholeheartedly railed against efforts by Dewey to frame the child as a sentimental “Rousseauean innocent.” It's possible to take Chalmers's view of the humanities as cold, but it was far from detached. Rather, in his view, reading was deeply personal:

Active, lively, sharp moral imagination was crucial to his traditionalist conservative worldview because it could liberate Americans from what Chalmers viewed as dogmatic pragmatism or overemotional reaction. In an open jab at Dewey, he dismissed teachers and professors who concerned themselves with “developing ‘attitudes’ rather than … coping with the hard job of increasing the number who can read critically.” He was resistant to the idea of mass consensus at the expense of individual thought. Instead, he imagined that “the social objective for popular education” could be “to bring a large number of people to the point where they can read accurately the editorials of the day.”Footnote ³⁶

Chalmers explicitly defended the concept of constitutionalism – the idea that the nation is held together by adherence to the document outlining its governing ideals. In line with New Humanists like Babbitt and the next generation of academic conservatives like Richard Weaver, he rejected valuing sentimentalism, feeling, and generalities over critical thought and specificity because he worried that these tendencies left students susceptible to weak ideas. Chalmers echoed Kirk's hope for protecting an invisible, universal natural order: “In a time in world history when the great organized forces both of intellect and of military power are mobilized against the universality of law and due process, it is clear that the central intellectual task of lovers of freedom is the understanding and exposition of these things.” In keeping with his experience as both a Protestant and a humanist, Chalmers understood American democracy as a text-based tradition upheld through exegetical study and rigorous debate. Chalmers was concerned about the diminishing role of the humanities not only in universities, but in public life. He linked the failures of American education and political life: “The reason for all the failure of thinking in the political sphere has been poor humanities. These errors of national policy are the price we have paid for starving them, for forgetting what the humanities are for, and for failing to re-define and re-discover their purpose and content.”Footnote ³⁷ Chalmers defended humanistic study as a legitimate means to navigate the human problems students would face in an automated, industrialized, and globalized world.

Despite what Chalmers described as his own “conservative” mind-set, it's important to understand him as a proactive reformer. The literary theory that Chalmers envisioned promoting was predicated on a fierce insistence on conveying to students the humanity of both author and reader as participants in a centuries-long conversation about human nature. Chalmers's emphasis on notions like character and the universality of human experience falls in line with Protestantism and with Kirk's brand of conservatism, and his understanding of literature as a sort of hard science that leads to universal truths falls in line with John Crowe Ransom's “New Critical” approach to close reading. Against both Dewey and Conant, he fumed, “The humanities are not culture; they are not escape; they are not antiquity; they are not texts; they are not art history; they are not philology; they are not tradition. They are materials and method by which we understand the ethos of modern American life.”Footnote ³⁸

THE KENYON PLAN

Korean War conscription, the ideological lure of communism, and grappling with postwar uncertainty animated much of the national conversation about education reform in the early 1950s. In 1951, the Ford Foundation established its Fund for the Advancement of Education to promote its postwar mission of “achievement of peace.”Footnote ³⁹ That same year, the faculty of Kenyon College discussed the possibility of revising bachelor's degree requirements to accommodate “able students in strong secondary schools to pursue a liberal arts education at a pace appropriate to their ability and their teachers’ interest and skills.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Under the auspices of the Ford Foundation, Chalmers convened a committee of leaders from elite liberal-arts colleges and well-respected public- and private-school administrators to discuss solutions to the simultaneous problem of inefficiency and protection of the liberal arts. The Kenyon Plan was one of four potential solutions to the problem of connecting high school and college. The Northeast-based Blackmer Committee, another Ford-sponsored group devoted to schematizing acceleration, received publicity and credit for developing the concept of college courses taught by high-school teachers.Footnote ⁴¹ Based at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Exeter, Andover, and Lawrenceville, the teachers on that committee lent prestige to the notion of advanced placement that helped legitimate the enterprise. But Chalmers and William Hafner Cornog led the effort to work with the College Board and implement the plan. With irritation, Cornog said of the Blackmer committee's work, “Their plan is a beatitude, ours is a blueprint.” While the Blackmer committee focussed narrowly on the six institutions with which its members were affiliated, the group from Kenyon hoped to generate conversation about a more transcendent sense of mission and standards.

In 1952, Chalmers published a report in the College Board Review apprising fellow educators of the project. He wrote, “The colleges cooperating in the study might be called conservative in the sense that they have not abandoned liberal for general education nor adopted the university device of the core curriculum.” Noting that all of the colleges accepted transfer students, Chalmers expected that faculties would communicate about their shared standards. If students could transfer credits between colleges, then perhaps they could transfer credits from high school to college. “In one way and another,” he wrote, “the subject-matter committees are considering how to define and describe this central core of required knowledge and the ability to use it.” By 1954, the “Central Committee on Admission with Advanced Standing,” shortened to the “Central Committee” in their correspondence and the remainder of this essay, produced a book on areas of mutual agreement and a concrete scheme for improving college preparation for exceptionally gifted high-school students rooted in the ideology that Chalmers expressed in his writing. Interchangeably called “the Kenyon Plan,” “the twelve-college study,” and the “School and College Study of Admission with Advanced Standing,” this report was the blueprint for the AP program and contained a brief justification for the program's existence and a bulletin of proposed courses.

As an administrator, Chalmers was committed to strengthening Kenyon's humanities program.Footnote ⁴² Cornog, then president of Philadelphia's Central School, served as Chalmers's co-chair. He had a doctorate in English. Given the broader goal of aligning high school and college, the “School and College Study” echoed its leaders’ dedication to language and literature. Although neither of the men were on the subject committees, the plans stipulated, for instance, that AP English Language class sizes be limited to fewer than twenty students so that each teacher could “know and deal with each of his pupils as a thinking individual.” The aim of the course was explicitly neither transactional nor career-oriented: “The student should be led to regard his theme writing not as means to an end, but as an intrinsically valuable process of mental self-exploration and orientation.”Footnote ⁴³ The AP English Literature course description repeated this defense of the inherent worth of engaging with words. The committee authoring the bulletin articulated their “fixed belief that the basic aim of all teaching of literature is to broaden comprehension and enhance enjoyment of literature, the greatest single criticism of life.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In keeping with this humanistic ethos, they are also careful to note that “there is nothing mechanical about the full reading of a piece of literature, and there is no slide-rule by which to compute its dimensions.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The emphasis was on qualitative, rather than quantitative, outcomes, and on maintaining the integrity of the discipline over concerns about measurement and credentials – the point was to make education meaningful, not to make it easily calculable.

Concern for distinguishing between vocational training and liberal-arts education is apparent throughout the report. As part of the “School and College Study,” the men appointed a special “Committee on Individual Development.” In a prefatory note to the 1954 bulletin, this committee expressed that it “wholeheartedly supports the values of a liberal education, and would caution school advisers not to let these opportunities for advanced work become vocational.”Footnote ⁴⁶ They warned that individual growth should be the goal, not credentialing or vocational training. “We deplore but accept the necessity of measuring scholastic progress by credit counts,” they wrote, “but we do not accept the mere acquisition of credit as the aim of our plan.”Footnote ⁴⁷ But there was a tension implicit in the program from the start: the bulletin concludes with some notes on the small pilot program undertaken during the previous academic year: students were eager to participate because they “recognized the benefit … in the prospect of an earlier start in their professional careers following graduation from college.”Footnote ⁴⁸

But vocal detractors warned about the dangers inherent to ceding to such a system. Oberlin chemistry professor Luke Steiner rejected an offer to chair the examination committee in his discipline, explaining to Cornog that he supported the notion of advanced placement and interinstitutional exchange, but, “It is to be expected that administrators – both in the colleges and the secondary schools – should think in terms of standards as automatic in operation as possible. Examinations act as such standards. However, I believe that formal examinations, if emphasized, tend to distort the learning process.” In correspondence with Steiner, Cornog explained that teachers at his own school “don't give a hoot” about external measures of success, and that examinations were the quickest possible way to ensure the program's success. According to Cornog, the Ford Foundation invested in the program because of “its broad applicability, and in the influence which it may have in American education, especially on secondary education. The only way in which a system of advance credit may have currency, at least in its first years, is by means of a series of validating examinations.”

In reporting on the advanced-standing project in an education journal, Cornog stated his aim: “the best achievable mastery of the humane knowledge necessary for liberal and democratic government at home and abroad.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In the first bulletin of courses, “If the advanced credit plan proposed by our study attracts the nationwide interest among secondary schools which it seems even now to be attracting … it will inevitably be necessary to construct a series of honors or advanced credit examinations,” with the caveat that the tests must, “at core, be essay-type.” And the group made clear their respect for the judgment of individual educators when they provided the qualification to their plans that “definitions and examinations can never be allowed to be the sole criteria for determining the granting of advanced credit. Much weight must be given to other evidence of unusual ability and valued personal qualities.”Footnote ⁵⁰

In tacit acknowledgement that there was tension between the Kenyon Plan's pedagogical philosophies and its practices, Cornog wrote, “I think that after a few years of experience and with the growth of mutual confidence and respect among schools and colleges, much can be done for improvement of instruction on both levels, and a system of accreditation of schools or school departments may well eventuate.” The Central Committee's report understood examinations as one possibility for facilitating communication among educators who shared students from grades 11 to 14. “Whatever practice is adopted,” they wrote in their recommendations to the College Board, “we should like to record our belief in the benefits of ‘inter-institutional’ reading of examinations, both to individual readers and to the cause of common standard and understanding among schools and colleges.” While addressing the “problem of communication” among faculties in schools and colleges, the Central Committee stated directly, “The college teachers have no wish to standardize courses and restrict the freedom and initiative of the teachers.” Still, some worried that the plans for examinations would do just that. Charles M. Coffin, chairman of Kenyon's English Department, called the plans for the English literature course “over-elaborate and confining,” and warned that the sample examinations in the field were “too prescriptive and mechanical.”Footnote ⁵¹ On behalf of his colleagues, he advised against offering “any program which would impose a stereotype or pattern of uniformity upon their work.”

In February 1954, Ford Foundation vice president Alvin Eurich responded to a request from Chalmers for an additional “$40,000 to support the development of teaching in the schools and two-day regional conferences of school officials of more than 400 schools.” Despite “recognizing fully the need for the type of activities outlined” in the proposal, Eurich had disappointing news. The foundation

Eurich suggested that independent universities might sponsor the kinds of organic exchanges Chalmers envisioned – institutes where teachers and professors would continually clarify and hone their shared sense for the disciplines in which they comprised two halves of education between grades 10 and 14. Although Chalmers had considered these meetings integral to the success of the Kenyon Plan, Eurich made clear that implementation of a plan for accelerated liberal education was beyond the Ford Foundation's scope. On 30 December, 1953, Chalmers had written to Eurich, “We voted in the Central Committee on December 12 to ask the College Examination Board to take over all of our examining activities in October, 1955, and to go out of business then.” By February, Eurich reminded Chalmers that “the College Entrance Examination Board a year ago last fall built its entire program around the articulation projects that were under way.” By the time Charles Keller, Williams historian and first director of the College Board's Advanced Placement program, wrote about his experience, professors and teachers were graded exams together in “the spirit of the Study” – an admission of the distance between Chalmers's imagined structure and its realization. Despite these misgivings, the “School and College Study” passed responsibility for making the program work to the College Entrance Examination Board.

The notion of a national system of examinations made many critics uneasy. But Chalmers and Cornog understood the College Entrance Examination Board's involvement as crucial to upholding high academic standards in the face of other reforms they thought weakened the quality of American education. Like many of their mid-century academic peers, they were optimistic about perfecting objective standardized examinations that would complement, not control, the proper aims of education. On 9 February, 1953 Cornog wrote to Chalmers that he was wary of “those old Mississippi gamblers at the Fund for the Advancement of Education.” The fund had supported the Kenyon Plan's work for three years. But when it was time to implement their proposal, which did not involve working with the College Board, the fund denied the request and redirected them to “existing channels.”

CORNOG'S REFLECTIONS

Chalmers did not survive to see the practical implementation of his ideas. For reflection on the program's effectiveness at translating ideals into practice, I turn to the work of William Hafner Cornog, the co-director of the “Central Committee” that produced the “School and College Study.” In Cornog, Chalmers found an intellectual and political sympathizer who condemned unthinking industrialization and insisted that humanistic study was relevant, and could fortify the nation's students against otherwise imminent decline. Cornog, executive director of the School and College Study, began his career as a medievalist, translating the works of Alain de Lille to fulfill his dissertation requirements. Cornog published a history of Philadelphia's Central High School, where he was principal until 1954. In the book's foreword, he wrote, “We have inherited the task of realizing in our forms, institutions, and structures of government if not the ideal and perfect state, then the means by which the ideals of freedom, justice, and equality, may be more nearly approached.” For Cornog, public education was essential to fulfilling “the major premise of democracy that men possess or in time shall possess the qualities of mind and heart to share with equal dutifulness and skill the basic obligations of democratic citizenship.”Footnote ⁵² Given mutual commitments to education for democratic aims and proclivities for shuttling back and forth between historical idioms in search of poetry, it is unsurprising that he shared many of Chalmers's views, not least of all a commitment to understanding education qualitatively. Cornog's concern about the quality of education led to wariness about developing a program that was more performative than substantive. He wrote,

Cornog was more interested in quality than in quantity, and he understood the conflation of the two as a mistake.

Like Chalmers, Cornog's vision was for a small, distinctive program. He expected the experiment to be costly and justified the program's implementation costs by appealing to recent reforms for “minority populations” and pushing for the inclusion of “gifted students” in this group. For Cornog, an acceptance of inequality was baked into American education. His understanding of education was deeply Jeffersonian, inasmuch as he understood it as the birthright of each student in a democracy to receive the most challenging possible level of education.Footnote ⁵⁴ Cornog wrote, “The time has long since come … to give our gifted students their counterpart of educational opportunity on the same terms as we have sought to give opportunity to the backward, the handicapped, and all minorities in public education.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In a 1980 College Board Review assessment of the program, he wrote, “Special education, extraordinary provision for the ablest students was as justifiable as for the disabled, on the plain principle of democracy. This argument was always called the dirtiest word in educational debating, ‘elitist.’” In principle, he believed that public schools should push all students to their unique, personal limits, though “this is not to say that everyone expending honest effort will achieve the same reward.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Although Cornog was openly elitist about who should have access to Advanced Placement courses (the first line of the first course description in the bulletin stipulates that students should only be encouraged to enroll if “their native abilities are great”), he believed in broad access to the enrichment and quality of life he envisioned for “able students.” He hoped that this program for gifted students would inspire high academic standards for all students because

Cornog rejected arguments for a utilitarian educational scheme that he took to deny the sanctity of the individual.

Part of the explanation for this interest in the expansion of the liberal arts is that, like Chalmers, Cornog believed liberal education to be closely aligned to the project of democracy. “My thesis is that poetry is more important to our salvation than rocketry,” he wrote by the mid-1960s.Footnote ⁵⁸ Also like Chalmers, he hoped that schools could become breeding grounds for a unifying “public philosophy.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Cornog took several moral propositions to be underlying the “School and College Study,” the first of which was an understanding that democracy “is a fluid, restless, dynamic, and thoughtful society in which men by taking thought can under their established rights of freedom of thought and expression constantly improve their lives … it is organic.”Footnote ⁶⁰ An education that prepared students for such a society must share in those characteristics, and so rigidity had no place in the curriculum he imagined. “The mature citizen,” Cornog imagined,

The benefits for Cornog, as for Chalmers, were not transactional. He insisted,

Like Kirk and Chalmers, Cornog distinguished between education and vocational training – individual development was an end in its own right, and acculturating students to a capitalist economy was not the goal. In fact, he expected the experiment to be costly: “The teaching load for teachers of these small special groups must be lighter than ordinary.” He continued, “The emphasis in all these courses should properly not be on quantity but on quality.”

Cornog was interested in cultivating autonomous citizens. For Cornog, the point was never to create a cost-effective slate of liberal-arts courses, but to provide education for the public good. In 1964 he wrote,

In order to prepare students for adult participation in democratic institutions, both Chalmers and Cornog understood firm grounding in letters as a defense against collectivism's soulless dehumanization.