I received a call from a teacher this week, asking me whether an email he had sent me had arrived. It hadn’t. I told him to try again and said I would reply to his message, once it had arrived, to confirm that I had received it.

A day passed and I still had not received his email – in fact I had almost forgotten all about it. But he called again to check, insisting that it had left his outbox. I realised what might have happened and asked him to verify that he had written the correct address. He started to spell it out and I finally understood what was wrong. He was mis-spelling “independent”, writing it “indipendent”, a common mistake we often come across in our job, considering that in Maltese the letter ‘i’ replaces the ‘e’ in the second syllable. That’s why the email never arrived.

“Independent” is not exactly an easy word, but neither is it too complicated and I would expect a teacher to know how it is spelt. I just hope this guy does not teach English.

Now, if a teacher cannot spell, I query how we can expect the students under his guidance to learn to express themselves correctly in writing. If a teacher does not know whether or not a word is spelt correctly, how can he teach his students?

Mind you, this is not an isolated incident. I have often received correspondence from teachers who cannot write a sentence without making mistakes, in Maltese or English. With teachers like these, it should be no surprise that the correct use of both languages is going down the drain.

Let me take the issue a step further. As editor and now managing editor of this newspaper, part of my responsibilities is to receive CVs from people applying to work as journalists and over the past eight years I’ve seen quite a few of them.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that I discard 80 to 90 per cent of applicants immediately because of spelling and/or grammatical mistakes in their CV. If someone aspiring to work as a journalist with an English language newspaper does not know the difference between “where” and “were”, or “there” and “their”, how can he or she expect to be given the job?

Let me make this clear. We are not perfect, and we’ve had our fair share of blunders in our publications. But it takes courage to send a CV to a newspaper editor, asking for a job, knowing that the basics of writing in a language are not there.

What is worse is that most of these applicants have graduated from our university.

Recently we have had several ceremonies during which hundreds of young men and women fulfilled their dreams by obtaining a rolled up piece of paper that certifies them as having obtained a degree. But as I followed the news and encountered groups of them making a lot of noise in Valletta’s streets, both before and after their graduation ceremony, I wondered how many of them could write a letter. Not many, I’m sure.

And when I think of the people I know who have continued their studies for a second degree – a Master’s or even higher – but then cannot string together a sentence, much less write it down, I just wonder what kind of education we are providing.

Correct spelling and grammatical perfection may not be requirements in areas unrelated to languages, and they are not requisites in order to be successful, but am I wrong to expect that people who have a degree should be able to make themselves understood, when they talk and when they write?

What is more irritating is that some of these graduates then go on to become responsible for the education of future generations, such as the teacher who made contact with me last week.

Very often we speak in figures, and I am glad to note that the number of people graduating from university has shot up in recent years. I am also glad to note that the number of students who further their studies beyond the obligatory schooling age is on the rise too, although we have not reached the desired figures as yet.

But when I come across such incidents, I cannot help but think that we are simply mass-producing graduates just to be happy with the numbers, and we are not looking deeply at the quality of the graduates we are producing. It could be argued that writing and speaking skills are not of paramount importance in certain professions; and this is true. At the same time, however, it is shameful that people leave university without the basics.

Matters have been made worse – and they will degenerate even further as we go along – because of the way mobile text messages are written and comments are passed on social networking sites. While in some cases it is just a question of wanting to abbreviate, in most it is blatantly obvious that people simply cannot write. Their string of words is incomprehensible.

It is very easy to say that the use of language – both spoken and written – should be protected. But the difficult part is how to set about achieving this. The way we’re going, the future in this respect looks very bleak.

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