Abstract EN:

All children do not equally give sense to their school attendance, to the subjects they have to learn, as well as to the ways of learning. This research focuses on children whose motives appear to be unclear, weak or absent. The question is : can school experience change their relation to school and to knowledge, although this relation is mostly built from family socialization ? The observation of a group of pupils during the first two years of elementary school shows it is possible, on the condition that the teacher succeeds to involve pupils in relevant cognitive activity, to increase their cognitive awareness, and to promote interactions between individual and collective processes. Literacy is specifically important for the achievement of development (because it requires particular awareness of cognitive and subjective processes), but in fact, every knowledge acquisition takes part in the development of motives. Knowing really makes sense for a child when he feels it makes him share a part of human history, which means that the ways of learning are coherent with an historical filiation. This anthropological approach of learning can be defined as follows : the problematical context in which the concept was historically built up should be reconstituted, so that the pupils become aware of the parallelism with human history ; the identification, by the pupils, of the conceptual difficulty is considered most important, as well as peer-interactions ; language is considered and used as a conceptual operator. This approach is liable to overcome the dichotomy between "doing" and "talking", in which school differenciations and social inequalities are tied.