Roads to Safe Places

I have a problem resisting old school books, especially for English and German classes - though I suppose ancient Biology books have the potential to be even more fascinating.

My most recent purchase is "The New Guide 1", which is from the early fifties and for Volksschulen, a school that covered years 1-8 for those students who were not likely to go on to tertiary education - until 1964 (West Germany), when they were replaced with a primary - secondary system and the secondary system got more differentiated as the Volksschule was replaced with the Grundschule for primary education, Haupt- and Realschule for secondary education.

The book frequently confuses me - I can see that the point of this is to teach students sounds, but the progression doesn't make sense to me - sentences like "My name is _____, what is your name?" that we covered in session two don't feature at all until Lesson 33, and the first things people learn are individual words and texts written to introduce the students to new sounds and what the book considers to be important spellings of the sound.

The book doesn't introduce characters the students can get used and attached to, and the stories in the book frequently touch upon poverty and hardship. Or they start out as cute and and then take a sudden turn, like this one: 



( More weirdness - father is not rich and Enid does not like black people (chimney sweeps in this case) )