The conference described in this report was designed to explore fundamentally important aspects of educating 3- through 13-year-old children in a variety of school settings. A total of 250 participants, representing 17 states, attended. This volume provides the text of a conference paper by Melvin D. Levine, M.D., entitled "The Challenge of Developmentary Education: Preserving Natural Diversity." Sections of the discussion focus on individual differences in young children's memory, selection and registration, storage, consolidation of material, active working memory, automatization of basic subskills, retrieval, and interferences with children's memory. Concluding remarks identify 10 societal issues to consider in thinking about possible reorientations of the elementary school. Also included are a few comments made at the conference by Dr. Ruth Love, the keynote speaker, and by workshop discussants, as well as a list of participants and three collaboratively written verses about education. (RH)