Blue Collar Poof

Or perhaps...Azure Collared Workers. What I would like here, as much for my own benefit as for those who might have been more directly hailed by the title, is a conscious effort, possibly at the public educational level, to bring handicraft and skilled labour type instruction to those groups who aren't naturally inclined that way. To put it more simply, I would like there to be more wood-working and auto-shop courses that can really be tailored to the novice and not involve the culture so often ascribed to those fields.

The point of this idea is to open up skilled labour at an early age as an option to more--and more types of--kids. As I sit in my cube writing this--in shear defiance of the use of the company issued computer--I think to myself, why can't I go into construction? Part of the answer is that I didn't pay very close attention when my father tried to show me how to repair the dishwasher or change the oil. Another part of the answer is that I made choices not to pursue a type of learning. And why did I make those choices? A lot of the time that can be ascribed to the fact that there was a type of dude that did those things, and I did not want to be and was not that type of dude. Imagine if people did things they wanted as opposed to bowing to social pressures. Certainly, that isn't possible. But we can help it along by making an effort to develop courses and a culture that is about learning the skills themselves and makes no presumptions about knowledge you should already have or culture that seems implicit in the activity.

How good would this be toward eliminated stereotypes about helplessness or girliness? That stuff ain't true and it shouldn't be a fight to learn some ways of becoming more self-sufficient.

I'll bet the urban environs already have this down pretty well, but I wanna see more of it and I wanna see it spread. It is important that we learn to keep in function contact with the things that make up our world, be it our cars, appliances, gardens or cabinets. And I think plotting every kid with half a chance of entering the business world in front of a keyboard and teaching them the home keys is certainly not the answer. These keys...are not my home.