So literacy grows and everyone becomes equal. Reading is
truly needed for access. It’s the key to success. Yay! Reading!
...So I’m going to go get my Dean Koontz on... Maybe some
Janet Evonovich. Whatever they sell near the authentico Mexican food at Kroger.
What? That’s not scholarly of me. I have no taste? If I’m
reading some paperback trashy thriller I must be some sort of muttonhead. How
awful. How Hugh Blair.
Now I’m not going to completely blame Hugh here. Much of the
blame can be shouldered by the capitalist mindset instilled in society since
the beginning of beginnings. Rather I just want to make note of a trend that
I’m brought up in several of my blogs (a lineage that goes back some 2,000
years now—the subject, not the blog). The trend is that language continues to
grow and with each iteration some one or group tries to create a hierarchy
where they can establish themselves at the top. It seems that universities are
especially adept at doing this. Even BizBerg concedes there is a devaluation of
common things in the classroom that persists even today (RT 948).
Taste according to Blair is “deeply founded in the human
mind” and “it is no less essential to man to have some discernment of beauty,
than it is to possess the attributes of reason and of speech” (955). So it is
ingrained in our being as well as being essential. The claim Blair lays out on
957-8 is pretty much a catch-22: You can have taste, but it could be the wrong
type (i.e. the “accuracy” he mentions on 958). The exact criteria for what is
good taste versus bad taste is not exactly illustrated (though it is “reduced”
by Blair to delicacy and correctness on 957).
Like I said, it’s not the idea of taste that I want to note
here as problematic as it is. BizBerg notes that the eighteenth century saw the
rise of private and public school systems—a divide that implies a Blairesque
idea of taste. The idea is repeated (as I plan to outline in my next blogpost)
in the right to speak—a key question being if someone has taste or social class
or a penis. Or all of the above. Taste, because the literacy playing field had
been leveled by the printing press, is now the grand decider of social class.
Now I’m interested in how this is reflected in today’s
structures. Taste, despite Blair’s claim, is too arbitrary. Schools still
define themselves and their students in terms of class. Materiality, as
Ferreira-Buckley points out, is still a major factor in the production and
ownership of texts (183)—a force that will surely only amplfy and complicate as
we work our way into the 20th century. Perhaps is the divide of
class in terms of education nowhere more obvious than when Ferreira-Buckley
describes the schooling of nobles in England. When the English nobility is put
into conversation with the Scottish university that admitted all the talented
folk (194), it’s hard not to wonder who Blair would say had taste.
What if taste is the key that allows middle-class Scottish students to move into positions of power ... the upper class, if not the aristocracy (which of course is closed to them). The claim here, I think, is that by acquiring taste you acquire access to a new status, to new power. But don't all schools and universities say this? Well, no, not explicitly in terms of "taste," but in terms of some set of wonderful skills that are the key to success -- e.g., critical thinking ability, advanced literacy. Miami University is all about taste, isn't it?
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