I’ve been thinking about taste lately. Several years ago I read a book that stuck with me, Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (2007), which is part of the 33⅓ series of books in which critics write about albums and songs. Some of the books in the series focus on how the songs were written and recorded, or on the artists involved, while others use their meditation on the music as a window into some larger subject. In Wilson’s case, he takes on Celine Dion’s 1997 album Let’s Talk About Love as a lens through which to examine the question of taste. Wilson starts by ruminating on the reality of Celine Dion’s popularity. How is it, he wonders, that millions of people around the world love her music, find it pleasurable and enjoy listening to it, while he strongly dislikes it? Do they have “bad” taste? Does he have “good” taste”? Do we get to judge the taste of others?

Wilson turns to the philosophy of taste to try and answer these questions — what is taste, and where does it come from? He leans heavily on Pierre Bourdieu and his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1984) as he seeks to answer this question. Bourdieu’s argument boils down to this: we form our taste out of our desire to belong to particular communities. In the past, this generally meant that taste was formed “upward,” as individuals aspired to higher social status, and brought themselves to enjoy the markers of that status as part of their aspiration.

I recognize that this might sound farfetched to you. I didn’t choose to like the things I like, you might say, I just like them! And certainly this thought has occurred to me too. But when I consider the various things for which I have a taste, the things I enjoy, and try to trace back where that enjoyment began, it gets harder and harder for me to resist Bourdieu’s argument.

Consider the cup of coffee sitting beside my computer. Why do I drink coffee? How did I come to enjoy it? I would guess that almost no one enjoys their first cup of coffee. I began drinking coffee when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand. My friends and I would hang out together, and would spend mornings in Bangkok in cafes, eating breakfast and drinking coffees. I wanted to be like them, to fit in, and to be like the kind of people with whom I associated drinking coffee — to be the kind of adult who was capable both at work, drinking Nescafe with my colleagues, and socially, hanging out with the other volunteers. 

I’d guess that most of us can trace our drinking of alcohol similarly — few enjoy wine or beer or liquor the first time around, it is the social setting, our social desires, that lead us to acquire a taste for it.

Taste in music, or books, or whatever other arts is similarly fashioned. This is probably easiest to see with the most rarefied arts, such as ballet or opera, which people commonly refer to as “acquired tastes.” As it turns out, all tastes are acquired, whether consciously or (more frequently) unconsciously.

I can’t stress this point enough. We enjoy things because we have developed a taste for them, and we develop a taste for things that offer us an identity as part of a desirable community. Even our first tastes — our earliest taste in music, for example, is formed by what we hear as small children, and our desire to be like our parents or caregivers. 

What does this have to do with learning?

What does this have to do with learning?

Think of how I acquired my taste for coffee. I drank it out of a desire to be a particular kind of person, to fit into a particular social group (even if that group was more imagined than real — after all, as Benedict Anderson (1983) has shown us, all communities are imagined communities). And so I made myself drink something that I didn’t particularly enjoy until I began to enjoy drinking it. Of course, I tried to drink versions I would enjoy more, such as the heavily sweetened, creamy Thai iced coffees, or Nescafe with plenty of added sugar and powdered creamer. And here I am, years later, sipping on my dark-roast black coffee with pleasure as I write. 

Copious research has shown us that pretty much anyone can learn pretty much anything. This leads us to ask: so why don’t we? All of us, myself included, are very good at not learning new things. 

Why is this? Our schools, society, everyone implicitly tends to treat learning as a rational process. If every learner could just set aside their humanity — their drifting mind, their pesky feelings, their fears, anxieties, preoccupations — they could just be a good little learning robot. In this model our reality as thinking feeling animals is an impediment to learning.

What I’d like to do, over the course of several posts, is to argue that we need to rethink learning, and to embrace a model of learning which makes our messy human reality our strength as learners rather than our weakness. And at the heart of my argument will be the need to focus on feeling, and on helping learners develop a taste for learning.