Perhaps a major decision that must be made by the organisers of professional conferences is whether to structure them in terms of a particular theme or alternatively to allow for a wide diversity of presentation and topics. If the former course is followed there is some danger that specificity of focus will be achieved at the expense of over-all attendance, but this did not appear to be the case at the recent meeting of the A.S.A., attended by over ioo members. Fortunately, the subject of the conference, ‘Education in Africa: current experiment and research’, was itself diffuse enough to enable contributions to be forthcoming from a wide variety of disciplines and from scholars whose research preoccupations were extremely diverse.