Your terminal is probably not correctly configured. Remember that real terminals did not originally have arrow keys or home end keys or really anything that's not in ASCII. If you're actually using a termcap old enough that it doesn't know about those escape sequences (maybe Solaris and other commercial UNIX offerings), or you're using a more recent termcap but your $TERM is set to something ancient, then the escape sequences are not interpreted.

Of course UNIX terminal handling is not standardized at all, so you may find that some programs ignore $TERM and do their own thing.