This tract was commissioned from Donald Meltzer and Martha Harris in 1976 by the Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development as part of a project to develop policies and programs that would support families in their educational task. It was included in Sincerity: Collected Papers of Donald Meltzer (1994) but has never until now been published as an independent work in English, though it has been published in French, Spanish and Italian and has had extensive use in those countries by therapists, teachers, teacher-trainers and social workers.

It is a unique work owing to its integration of a psychoanalytical theory of learning with an ecological conception of how the various systems involved in the educational process are interconnected, and as such is still of great present-day relevance, both to clinical and educational practitioners and to policy-makers.