When I started planning these posts, I had a few that were already good to go.
The one about sandwich eating, for example. But over the course of writing this month, I realise how much books become a way that you enter into a whole range of experiences and understandings. Including of other cultures.
When I was at secondary school, the world of textbooks became that much larger.
It had been there at primary school too, of course, but there were more books that still felt like regular books. At secondary school, you had a bag full. But they weren’t all the same.
Some seemed to be full of things to push into your head (or to find, in desperation, when the Chemistry teacher assumed we all knew about valencies rather earlier than I think we were meant to).
But others were ways of opening doors, and discovering new parallel worlds. Ones where there were completely different signs for bus stops – and yet people coped!
The book was Deutsch Heute, and I was learning German. (I’d had a little go at it earlier, but you can read about that a few posts back.) I knew the words were different – some of the sounds were different – but it never occurred to me that people would then think to change how their daily worlds looked and functioned.
This wasn’t jingoism – it was not having been abroad at a time when I could really take in the world. I knew already that different parts of the UK had different words, different expressions, and had got used to switching to whatever was needed.
But postboxes were still the same – in other words, there were still landmarks that helped you orientate yourself.
When you learn another culture, those landmarks shift. Sometimes, you can recognise what they mean quite fast – you learn the word for bus stop (Haltestelle), you see the textbook showing signs by the side of a road with an H on. In a while, you might put the two together.
Anyway. I learned German. The school kindly decided to start their first exchange with Germany, and I was booked on it fairly fast, along with many of my friends. I had a few ideas of what to expect – but I was unprepared for that moment of visual recognition when I was there, and suddenly started seeing The Things That Were In the Textbook. Imagine!
Bus stops. Post boxes. Signs with the capital B shape that is really a double s.
(That itself is now more of an endangered species, since German spelling reform.) They were all there – and people were living around them and using them, and taking them for granted. And life was clearly still working.
These days, travel is much easier, quicker, cheaper. Brands work in multiple languages – what we know at home is available elsewhere.
Equally, what we know at home is also now in multiple languages. All those boxes, bottles and so on in my German teacher’s classroom have less of an impact than they did when they were our early introductions into packaging in other languages.
So we have more signposts. We are also more familiar with the foods, the music of other cultures. All this is good. It helps see what is important to our friends. It helps us prepare, if we are going to go to other places.
But books are partly there to tell us that the world is full of strange and sometimes wonderful things that we have not even thought of yet. Things that millions elsewhere take for granted, yet that leave us not knowing their purpose, their importance, and so on.
And textbooks – other books too – are ways to gradually break down the culture shock. To show us not just the stand out cultural features, the monuments, the national symbols, but the everyday ones too. The ones that are so familiar to them – but not to us – or vice versa.
This kind of book also encouraged an early social anthropologist outlook, in a way. To look on and work out the importance of a thing, its role, by how it was used. To see that it was familiar to others, to accept that, and move on.
By the time I made it to university, and a whole other set of textbooks, I was ready to explore ways into worlds further away from my own. And more able to spot the signposts for these worlds – ones that I might in fact recognise as important in my own.
Food. Shelter. Transport. Opportunity. Because sometimes the greater shock is, after the difference, seeing how much we actually do have in common.