Beyond Blue and White

Preparing for work in a sky-collar world

JC Leyendecker Study for an Advertisement for Arrow Collars (1914)

A seamstress in my neighborhood offers a useful service. For a small fee, she will turn the collar on a man’s dress shirt, thereby hiding the wear marks that form on the neckline and, in so doing, extending the life of the garment.

Recently, after picking up, and hanging up, a quartet of shirts refreshed in this manner, I realized that most of the collars that I wear on a daily basis were neither white nor blue, but a shade that mail-order catalogues of the 1990s would sometimes describe as “sky.” This, in turn, led me to think about the neitherlands, the world between the realms of pure physicality and unalloyed speculation in which many, if not most, people work.

This reflection on my wardrobe also brought to mind the point made by Ken Robinson that “the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.”¹ If this is true, then it means that the population of the aforementioned neitherlands consists largely of failed academics.

That thought, in turn, led me to ponder the possibility of a world of sky-collar work in which the places currently occupied by persons who fell off the train to Harvard were, instead, filled with people who, earlier in life, had learned, and perhaps even practiced, a manual trade. Thus, rather than bemoaning the uselessness of his degree in economics, the programmer with whom I spoke last week would have told me tales of his days as a plumber.

I cannot, of course, guarantee that the young man in question might not have lamented the time he spent busting his knuckles. I suspect, however, that a number of factors, economic and otherwise, would have replaced regret with satisfaction and, perhaps, even a degree of nostalgia. Thus, in addition to having avoided both the burden of debt and the trivial tyranny of teachers, the former tradesman would enjoy the self-confidence that comes from having built, from wood, wire, pipe, or brick, things of obvious value to other people. (The same cannot be said for the experience of constructing, out of widgets and assumptions, castles in the air.)

1. Sir Ken Robinson Do Schools Kill Creativity? TED 2006, minute mark 9:35.