4 ideas
In 1969 Mehdi, a ten-year-old from a small Moroccan town, wins a scholarship and becomes a boarder at the lycée Lyautey, the elite French school in Casablanca. He spends a year among French teachers, classmates and host families, understanding almost nothing of their customs, jokes or unspoken rules. He gets through by guessing, imitating and misreading.
When a newcomer takes a dominant culture's habits at face value, such as its table manners, idioms, family rituals and classroom codes, the comedy that results is not only at his expense. His literalism shows that these norms are arbitrary conventions, not natural facts. The 'civilized' insiders become as strange and opaque as the outsider is to them.
A merit scholarship grants formal entry to an elite institution. It does not transmit the tacit knowledge that insiders absorbed at home: how to behave at a host family's dinner, what counts as rude, which rules are real. The admitted outsider must therefore assimilate by trial, imitation and silent error. That hidden curriculum becomes a second exam that only he is sitting.
A child cut off from the social life of a language can still acquire it through reading, and so arrive at its written, literary register before its spoken, everyday one. This creates a lopsided fluency. He can inhabit the imagined world of the language's books while still stumbling over what its native speakers mean in ordinary conversation.