Most educated people assume they can think well, write well and speak well.

Yet you don't have to be the most observant of human beings living on these hothouse dustbowl islands, to realise that most people in fact can't write well, don't think too clearly and speak the "gobbledygook" which follows.

And the issue/problem is not just about the growing use of "Minglish."

This is not only a challenge locally though, where we also have to deal with the challenges of being a three-language country.

English for business and for all modern living vocabulary, Maltese for day to day bread and butter conversation and communication stuff including swearing, while listening to Italian for quality programming or just sheer entertainment TV.

These problems were recently also highlighted in the UK where a report by the Royal Literary Fund looked into, amongst other things, the writing skills of students who arrive at University.

The report concluded: "Most contemporary British students arriving at University lack the basic ability to express themselves in writing, growing numbers are simply not ready for the demands that higher education is-or should be-making of them."

The situation there is even more alarming apparently post university as is ours. Across the UK many employers are increasingly seeing little benefit from employing graduates. It seems to be more beneficial to them to employ school leavers (and not only because they are cheaper to employ!) which is worrying all round.

It is worrying for the students, worrying for the taxpayer whose resources have been wasted, worrying for most parents who fret and put so much, emotionally and financially, into ensuring their children do benefit from a good education.

If things go on as they are, this will not be the situation in Malta in 20 years time but perhaps in five to ten, where we could start have an increasing number of graduates on our unemployment register unless certain practical issue are addressed quickly, not least the ability to think clearly, speak clearly and as a consequence, write well.

Even taking account of shyness, nerves and all the other things that go on at interview, I too have been surprised by many of our graduates as opposed to the school leavers that we interview in my place of work.

It is true that very often there isn't a great deal of difference between them, particularly in their speaking or creative skills, and later in their writing skills. Surely five more years of education should give you bit more than that?

Our graduates simply can't think out of the box. And of course I'm not being critical of them. They are simply never trained to think. Our education system, as I have said time and time again, is all about learning mantras.

It's almost never about questioning, about the freedom to think individually, or even God help us, about the enjoyment that comes from having a mind which is open, which thinks and which is receptive to the bombardment of stimuli which are all around us if we opened our eyes ears, minds et al.

And the Church's obsession of having extra classes for Communion and Confirmation because the normal religion class at school is not enough does not help either. After school, children should be free to play, to communicate, to create, to think and not be sat down again to learn stuff which passes straight through like sieves but still leaves some of them, brainwashed but brain dead.

Certainly though, we need an equivalent of this Royal Literary Fund to see what can be done locally about the same problems and challenges. Good writing is really important, and as one contributor to the UK Sunday Times (or to be more precise her apparently ferocious history teacher once said) "If you can't write something clearly, it's because you don't understand it clearly."

Lets forget about this boring and pointless Maltese versus English debate and all the language academies fighting outdated battles. Let's set up

a joint entity to focus on one big problem and one achievable goal… that our graduates least are at the very given the space to breathe and to come out of University with the ability to think and write in English and in Maltese.

Not too much to ask of the new Rector is it?