Why a Historian Wants Schools to Teach Smell
Dr Will Tullett, a senior lecturer in early modern history at the University of York, is calling for olfactory education — the deliberate training of one's sense of smell — to be introduced in primary and secondary schools. He argues that children need a better education in sniffing aromas to improve their wellbeing and deepen their understanding of the world around them. His book Sniff: A History of Smells is due to be published on 8 September. The Guardian
Tullett's case rests on several interconnected claims about the role smell plays in cognition, health, and social life. He noted that many studies have linked smells and the ability to enjoy them to wellbeing, and that smell loss often results in depression, anxiety, and other symptoms. He also cited food safety and sustainability as practical benefits of a trained nose: the ability to judge whether something is fresh by aroma, rather than relying solely on a use-by date.
A key strand of his argument concerns language. Smelling more items, Tullett said, enlarges the vocabulary through which people can describe other things. He drew a parallel with sommeliers — wine professionals who smell everything at marketplaces to expand their range of reference points. The idea is that olfactory training is not merely sensory calibration but a tool for sharper descriptive and analytical capacity.
Tullett also challenged what might be called the olfactory decline narrative. Pollution, he acknowledged, has been found to impair people's olfactory abilities. But he pushed back against the notion that smell itself is underappreciated, noting that people often recount vivid memories associated with particular aromas. He similarly dispelled the misconception that the past was a smellier place. The past didn't stink any more or less than the present, he said; it just smelled different.
The modern world, in Tullett's account, has not eliminated smell so much as engineered it. Many objects and substances today, from margarines to car interiors and homes, have been stripped of their original smells and reodourised with synthetic scents. This raises questions about what is lost when the olfactory environment is designed rather than encountered, and whether the synthetic masking of original odours diminishes the sensory literacy Tullett advocates cultivating.
His call for self-awareness extends to the social and ethical dimensions of smell. Smells are still used to discriminate, he said, citing landlords refusing to let properties to people of particular ethnicities over beliefs about food aromas, and a proposed bill in the Commons that could have criminalised rough sleepers for excessive smells. He urged people to be more self-aware of their attitudes to odours and more empathetic towards other people's olfactory preferences. Thinking about smells, he added, could help people understand themselves and provide useful information about the world.
Tullett's academic credentials underpin these arguments. His research has principally focused on the history of smell from the 1600s to the present, with additional forays into histories of sound, medicine, science, gender, and pollution. His PhD thesis was titled Smell, Smells, and Smelling. He is the author of Smell in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social Sense (Oxford University Press, 2019, cited 111 times) and Smell and the Past: Noses, Archives, Narratives (2023, cited 44 times). Sniff ranges across witchcraft and murder, fin de siècle Parisian theatres, and 1960s New York cinemas, broadening his scope from academic monograph to general readership.
Tullett is also a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Smell History and Heritage, launched in 2023 through the Odeuropa project to bring together academic expertise on smell from multiple disciplines. A key part of the earlier "Scents of History" project, which he was involved with, aimed to highlight how the meanings and uses of different smells have changed over time. That historical dimension informs his educational proposals: if the significance of a given odour shifts across centuries, then learning to smell is inseparable from learning to question what one is smelling and why it carries the associations it does.
The broader context here is that olfactory education occupies an unusual position in contemporary pedagogy. Visual and auditory literacy receive institutional attention; olfactory literacy does not. Tullett's proposal, while modest in scope (he suggested training at home as well as in school), would require curriculum designers to grapple with questions that go beyond nose-training exercises: whose smells count as educational material, how synthetic environments complicate the project, and whether schools can address the discriminatory uses of smell he identifies without straying into contested territory around ethnicity, class, and public space. The intersection of pollution's documented impact on olfactory function with the engineered scentscapes Tullett describes also suggests that any educational programme would be working against countervailing environmental forces. Whether his arguments gain traction among policymakers remains an open question, but the publication of Sniff next week will place them before a general audience for the first time.
