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Dropping out of school in adolescence is problem met with increasingly in medical-psychological consultations. Our hypothesis is that what is experienced as dropping out may be linked to excessive clinging by the adolescent to his childhood experience. Now learning at school implies leaving certain things behind at the school gate in order to open oneself to otherness. We will also see the extent to which the triple appropriation expected in adolescence of the body, of thought, and of his history, will interfere in development at school, which is experienced not only as a place of learning but also as a place of life and experimentation in the social domain. A clinical illustration will help to elucidate this in the light of the appropriation of language.