Getting an Obfuscation


Thought I was studying a diploma of education!
And bought the 2006 teaching textbooks.
Then gagged trying to read them.

And I am slightly literate! I returned them.
Not worth buying if they fail the readability test.

Yet, the pain is, I have to know them to pass.
Is this the self-styled educator’s ordeal,
the testing ground of strained intelligence,
where I pass if I fail?

Fail to reject: ‘Education outcomes’ where I would say: ‘learning.’
Fail to reject: ‘school achievement behaviour’ where you could say: ‘learning.’
Fail to reject: ‘experiential skill areas’ where you could say: ‘skill’
Fail to reject: ‘various indices of effective behaviour.’
where you could say: ‘learning’ or ‘skills.’

Is this the word-car’s crash - on education’s dingaring road,
The pile-up of dud and plastic language into a traffic jelly
A commuted stupidity A word-snarl that convinces willing idiots
to crumple up to abstracts as if to be seen in profundity…

Achievement becomes abstract riders on abstract nouns
in our mind’s death sentences, convoluted with crippling
injuries of syntax, in complex clauses
that would render us less significant, or stupid.

Call that an educative menu? Just mouthing the texts
I get the foretaste of retchings I don’t need to digest.

A sick empire’s tailors spin up
insubstantial clothes.
This time, not transparent, but
stupefying, obscuring…

The obfuscators? why do they do it? making
teachers for school with those long periods
of subservience to the institutionalization
of our obfuscation, being idiot conformisers
who turn freedom on the loom of confusions
into this conformity, this slave obscurity…
this ignoble, obfuscated slavishness to form,
a yet suave unintelligentsia.

I am a reader, an educator,
seeking education, and knowledge
of mankind in truth to stay sane, so I turn
back to books
as readable as Thucydides who wrote
in 408 BCE:

“as the result of these revolutions
there was a general deterioration
of character throughout the Greek world.
The simple way of looking at things,
.. so much the mark of noble nature,
was regarded as a ridiculous quality
and soon ceased to exist”

Now that book gets me a noble education
With the others I’m getting an obfuscation.


16 March 2006 © Wayne David Knoll
Australian Catholic University, Fitzroy, Victoria