One in four children faces serious difficulties in acquiring the basic knowledge offered by school. Despite being equally intelligent and curious as other children, they fail to effectively take on the role of a student. However, the problem of academic failure is rarely found where it originates: in the desire for knowledge, which makes learning possible.

In this book, Martine Menes explains how the desire to learn appears and is maintained. Because this desire has a history, which accompanies the phases of psychological development. And if instability, inhibition, and anxiety disturb the child at the moment when the appropriate behavior and necessary skills for studying should be activated, then the course of this story encounters problems. Both the necessary condition of childhood dependence on others and the difficulty of accepting limits can hinder the child from coming into contact with the rules, losses, and loneliness, which are the natural limitations of learning. The chance circumstances of a child's journey, their interactions with the environment, and their encounters with the usual imperfections of adults, whom they considered all-powerful, influence both their emotional development and their cognitive functioning.

Martine Menes, with her psychoanalytic gaze, a gaze sharp from her particularly rich experience in medical-psychoeducational centers (CMPP), takes us on a human adventure to the foundations of knowledge transmission and explains with particular clarity where it is based and how our relationship with learning can develop smoothly.