With new school programs a topic of everyday conversation, the public is ready to accept a sound, new curriculum in English. Here, such a term as "new school programs" means, roughly, school learning that conforms to tenets of scholarship, especially to those tenets concerning structure of disciplines and methods of inquiry. For example, in some older programs, literature was used in units on such topics as Eskimos and immigrants. Often the use of literature in these topical units was mainly to provide information about Eskimos and immigrants and to improve skills of reading. However valuable, such activity is hardly literary. On the other hand, a work of literature in newer programs is used to teach pupils how to read literature as literature and how to use methods of inquiry appropriate to literary study. Some barriers to newer programs derive not from public reaction but, oddly, from those professionally concerned with the teaching of English. Usually the opposition is not mere hostility to the new, but comes from failure to understand and to be convinced that the newer ends and means are desirable and feasible. A typical reaction to programs based on the newer ideas holds these to be impractical, unreal, unnecessary, or too radical. Practicality and reality are thus associated with the familiar, with the solving of everyday problems. But there is no necessary relation between the unfamiliar on the one hand and the practical, the desirable, and the necessary on the other. This paper, therefore, first suggests the desirability of these newer kinds of programs and then identifies and examines some barriers and problems that hinder their fulfillment. The term " methods of inquiry " refers to procedures with or without pedagogical adaptation that specialists in a field of knowledge use professionally. Each subject field history, zoology, linguistics, rhetoric, and so on has evolved unique methods for investigating distinctive kinds of problems and objects. The use of such investigative methods is one characteristic of activity in a discipline. Whether in advanced study or in school learning, investigative method characteristically is not taught as an isolated aspect of content. Usually the student of a discipline learns to use and to understand the methods through such activities as these: (1) learning the presuppositions of the field, (2) seeking answers to questions relevant to a given area of inquiry, (3) understanding relevant concepts and using terminology that names the concepts, (4) solving problems according to accepted procedure, and (5) working within the limits and facing up to the difficulties imposed by the field. In this paper such terms as "appropriate inquiry" and "relevant inquiry" are synonymous with "methods of inquiry," just defined. There are at least three reasons for concern with methods of inquiry in school learning. The study of investigative method increases interest in a subject, enables the learner to acquire the best available ways of thinking about it, and provides a basis for his continuing education after his school-going days. The term "structure of disciplines" refers to sets of those concepts or gen-