Teaching Taste Without the Cultural Arrogance

“Good taste” can sound like a compliment, but it can also be a warning label, a class signal, or a quiet way of telling someone they do not belong. I follow on from my earlier work on taste and pull apart what we really mean when we use the word in design education, especially when a single voice in the room has the power to define what counts as “good”.

I’m responding to a brilliant prompt from Tristram Shepherd, who shared a PDF of a ChatGPT conversation that pushed my thinking forward. From there, I map out three practical lenses for understanding taste: discernment (learning to notice craft, skill, originality and fit), status taste (how culture and consumption signal sophistication or wealth), and fashion taste (how what feels elegant can quickly become dated). Along the way, I use a concrete example of luxury branding and pricing to show how easily “taste” turns into a message about status.

The heart of the episode is teaching. Design movements and styles, from Victorian architecture to Bauhaus and Memphis, come from cultural context, politics, and provocation, not from timeless rules. That context is what we should be teaching, because it helps pupils make informed judgements without copying a canon.

I also name the risk of cultural arrogance and cultural policing, especially in schools where the dominant view of taste is often middle class and institutionally approved. The goal is not to “improve” pupils into our preferences, but to widen experience so their judgements become more informed, flexible, and reflective. If this resonates, subscribe, share the episode with a colleague, and leave a review so more teachers can find it.

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Transcript

Why Taste Keeps Coming Up

Alison Hardy 0:07

This episode is a follow-on from Tuesday's episode. It's been a while since I've done an episode for subscribers, but I wanted to use the space to explore some ideas around what I talked about on Tuesday and the LinkedIn article I did last week about taste. Because as I said on Tuesday, Tristram Shepherd sent me a PDF of a chat that he'd had with Chat GPT. Now, you know, he'd obviously used it and he's used it really thoughtfully and actually, it's given me lots to think about, and I want to share some of that here. I'm not here to discuss the irony of us using uh AI to develop our thinking or whatever, but it it was it was useful because it had some really interesting phrases and it got me thinking um about this word taste that was used in the talk I listened to. Um Kevin did put it taste and judgment. Um and one of the things I found quite interesting is that there was a bit of a lack of recognition, maybe from the floor, about the people that were talking um were might, I want to say middle-aged men because um from the talk I could suss out that they went to university about the same time I did, and I like to think I'm middle-aged at 55. But anyway, there's a position of privilege um when we're talking there, or particular way we view the word, the world rather, um, about taste. And and Tristram in his conversation with Chat GPT pulled out um some of these things, and I I found it um I I really I really like the way Tristram Shepherd makes me think. If

Taste As Subjective Learning

Alison Hardy 1:50

you don't sign up for his blog, then really do please sign up for it because I think it's it's interesting. Because it talks about uh that taste is very subjective, um, and it it involves uh a way of looking at things that have developed over time and other people telling us that that's good taste, or um somebody else influencing our taste because we want to be like them or not like them. Um so you know, good taste can actually come in very many different forms. It can come about uh discernment, um, where you start to notice um the craft, the skill, the originality, the style, the way it fits or doesn't fit, the way it makes us things feel uncomfortable. Uh the status taste, uh, where cultural preferences signal class or sophistication or wealth. Um so here's here's an indication of you might not think it's sophistication, and somebody may come back to me and say you shouldn't be buying those products. Um but I use Clarence products and I and I go in, went into Clarence yesterday, and I noticed they had a new display, and I can't remember what the name of it was, but it was all gold and white, so it was signalling sophistication, and the price point for the daily moisturizer was £299. Now I I I was aghast, okay. But when noticing that that is signalling a status, okay, and that's something around taste. Okay, I kind of got off on a big tangent, whinging and moaning about the price of something, and then there's the the fashion taste, um, which is which is unstable because fashion changes. Um that you know, one what was elegant a decade ago or sophisticated a decade ago, um, may become an embarrassment, you know, Crikey. I think back to when CNA, so those

Discernment Status And Fashion Taste

Alison Hardy 3:55

of you who are old enough will know what I mean by CNA, the clothing shop. Um, you know, and back in the 80s, things like Cerise and Jade were in, and I had um Cerise trousers and a matching Cerise and black check shirt, and the same in Jade, and I thought I was so cool, I I wouldn't be seen dead in it now. Well, but partly those colours don't suit me anymore, but also, you know, there's an embarrassment. So when we're developing taste, we need to be thinking about how are we developing all of those in children? Um, because we have to understand our own position when we're talking about taste and what we discern, right, which is something we need to make people aware of, but not necessarily teach them that how we different people discern something as being good or bad taste, okay? So I think I think just splitting it down into into those things about discernment, status taste, fashion

Architecture Context And Design Movements

Alison Hardy 5:00

taste is is something to think about. And interestingly, Tristram's um chat GPT chat was called Ghastly Good Taste, which apparently, and I had to go and look this up, links to a book that John Bechman wrote in 1933. So I I've had to go online to look this up, um, where he presents uh a defence of Victorian and Edwardian architecture, which, and again, I'm I'm reading off the internet here, so is an where he argues they are unjustly maligned by the modernist movement. So that's about that fashion taste, okay. And so when we're looking at things that we now think are, I don't want to use the distasteful, but untasteful, not in fashion, we have to understand and be teaching children around the cultural context, why Victorian architecture came into being, and that got me thinking about design movements, and which is why I think another reason why I think it jars to say when we're teaching children to design something in the style of a design movement, because design movements came about the Victorian style, modernist, postmodernist, um, de Still, Bauhaus, Memphis, and so on, all came about as a result of either a political situation or uh to provoke something or um to contribute to a way of seeing the world. And that's actually, I think, what we should be teaching children when we're teaching them about these design movements, because we can't say they are good taste, um, because they're fashion, but we can say that they they became fashionable because of different contexts, and that's that's the bit that we're teaching children, but also to then look beyond that fashion context and go, well, what did make it um good or bad, if we want to take it down uh that emotive language of good or or bad.

Cultural Arrogance And Better Teaching

Alison Hardy 7:16

So this then also got me to thinking this was in Tristram's notes, is this phrase that really resonated with me? And if you've listened to some of my podcasts before, you won't be surprised. Um, is this phrase cultural arrogance? Many teachers in schools in England are white, middle class and well educated. And it is not for them or us or me, because I'm in the same situation, of trying to say this is the right taste, okay? That we're not trying to improve other people, right, and improve the children. We're actually helping them develop their own taste about being perceptive, curious, and discriminating. It's not about telling them what is inferior or what they value as inferior, it's about widening their experience so that their judgments become more informed, more flexible, and more reflective. They are likely to stay grounded in their own context. And why shouldn't they? Because we're not about removing people from their context, but it's about becoming uh discerning. We're not about, as it talks about in this Chat GPT, cultural policing. Because as it goes on to say, it can imply that middle class, Western, canonical, or institutionally approved forms are automatically superior, while popular, local, commercial, or youth cultures are treated as crude or lesser. So it is about approaching this with a degree of caution about a good teacher needs to reflect and understand their place, and about being able to then uh being aware of that in indicating and articulating their own taste. But also then when they're exposing children to uh different designs, informing them of different is is thinking about balance around that.

Final Reflections And Thanks

Alison Hardy 9:29

So those are just some of my further thoughts around this topic, and that I hope you've found useful, interesting, maybe not, but uh I hope so. And as ever, thanks very much for supporting the podcast. I really do appreciate you taking the time to do that.