Looked over all the docs for BMEshop's new payment system. All of the current stuff (mail in money order and call-in [talk about secure!] credit card) will still work, but in about three weeks you can also expect a fully integrated online billing system. Also, expect our new toll-free number to be up within a day or two at most.
Other than that, I've been doing more research into my “school rules on piercing as social control” article… like I said, the goal is to illustrate that the age restrictions on piercings along with the rules against piercings at school are singularly related to one goal and no others: social control.
Came agross this quote from the Senate Committee on Education, who in 1888 (as the US school system was being instituted), wrote,
We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes.
At that point in history, schools were local and decentralized, and in many ways still built on the guild-concept of education (ie. learn by doing), versus our “modern” method of learning by “memorization”. In addition, because the US had rejected international copyright law, classic literature and European literature was inexpensively available, so even the lower class children tended to be better educated by the time they were 12 than an 18 year old produced by the current education system.
(And when the lower classes become educated, they don't want to be the lower classes any more!)
How many times have you heard that the school system is there to mold? The governments who run the school systems realized that they needed to slow down the education process to create individuals that could be controlled by the state, and wouldn't redefine it as they saw fit. William Harris, the US Commissioner of Education, wrote,
Ninety-nine out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.
Anyway, I don't want to give away too much, but Eminem notes something very important in White America. To quote,
Surely hip hop is never a problem
In Harlem only In Boston
...See the problem is I speak to suburban kids
Who otherwise
Woulda never knew these words exist
When I was in public school it was no big deal to have a mohawk and stretched ears and whatever else I wanted. I was the “one kid out of a hundred” — just like the education system wasn't created until the lower classes started to rise up, and punk wasn't attacked till it went mainstream, and rap wasn't attacked until it went white, piercing wasn't attacked until it started to challenge the mold-making process of education.
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