...of edification

Actually no one could have given them advice. Pierre and he realised very soon that they were on their own. M. Bernard himself, whom they in any case would not dare to disturb, could tell them nothing about this lycee he did not know. At home ignorance was still more complete. For Jacques's family, Latin, for example, was a word that had absolutely no meaning. That there had been (besides primitive times, which they on the other hand could imagine) times when no one spoke French, that civilisations (and the word itself meant nothing to them) had succeeded each other with such different customs and languages - these truths had not reached them. Neither the images, nor things written, nor word of mouth, nor the veneer of culture acquired in everyday conversation had reached them. In this home where there were no newspapers, nor, until Jacques brought them in, any books, no radio either, where there were only objects of immediate utility, where no one but relatives visited, a home they rarely left and then only to meet other members of the same ignorant family - what Jacques brought home from the lycee could not be assimilated, and the silence grew between him and his family. At the lycee itself, he could not speak of his family; he sensed their peculiarity without being able to articulate it, even if he could have overcome the insuperable reticence that sealed his lips on the subject.

[The First Man, Camus, A.]