thought provide the opportunity for more complex kinds of learning. In other words, the educational assumptions and techniques that may be appropriate to and effective in the elementary school are not necessarily the best ones for the junior and senior high school. The difference would seem to be self-evident, yet there has been a vigorous and conscious effort, by no means at an end, simply to extend much of the rationale of informal education into the secondary schools, first in England and more recently in the United States, where it seems to be merging with the laissez-faire approach of the romantics. It does not find the notion of a sequential curriculum congenial. T is both convenient and fairly accurate to date American awareness of this trend from the Dartmouth Confer4This assumption, however, which many British proponents of informal education have accepted with a literalness that might startle its author, has recently been called into question by research conducted by P. E. Bryant of Oxford and T. Trabasso of Princeton. Bryant and Trabasso have set off a lively discussion in British teacher-training institutions by reporting evidence that even four-year-olds can make abstract inferences of number and quantity. They suggest that Piaget's opposite conclusions were the result of a defect in his experimental design: failing to insure that the child remembers it is that he is being asked to make inferences about. The child's apparent lack of inferential ability may be only a failure in memory; Bryant's and Trabasso's subjects drew inferences readily when the experimenters took precautions against memory loss (Transitive Inferences and Memory in Young Children, Nature [August 13, 1971] 232: 456-458). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.162 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 06:26:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms A RAGE FOR DISORDER 1213 ence in the summer of 1966, where about fifty educators from Great Britain, Canada, and the United States met for a month to discuss the teaching of English. The American and British points of view collided head-on the very first day of the conference, when an American attempt to define the content of English as a school subject was countered by a British declaration that English has no content-English is simply what English teachers do. The best subsequent statement of the British view is contained in John Dixon's report of the conference, Growth Through English,5 which, although in theory it was supposed to represent the conclusions reached by the entire conference, is actually a manifesto setting forth the