Some two years ago, the Federation of Kenya Employers (FKE) expressed concern that graduates from middle-level and higher education institutions had not mastered the art of communication. Some 49.1 percent of responding enterprises identified effective communication as the most lacking social skill in job applicants, according to the 2023 report.

At the core of communication is the need for clarity, simplicity, and coherence in the communication or articulation of ideas, thoughts and values – which people act on to make things to work.

Why should nearly a half of respondents complain that job applicants falter on this very basic, but critical skill? What is the problem? The prospective employees have had long years of schooling.

There are several reasons for this. First, university students are overly exposed to books written by academics. The writing is stuffy, rigid and full of jargon.

Newly admitted university students in the United States undertake what they call Freshman Composition, a writing course. The course focuses on improving students’ abilities to think in speech and on paper. The course is more about rhetoric, the art of persuasion in writing and speaking.

Most of the curriculum resources in this course are writings by great thinkers and public intellectuals who wrote to address the burning issues of their days in popular language. Included are speeches, treatises, letters, reports, poems, novels, plays.

The materials are a study in clarity, simplicity, and coherence. They always look at issues in the light of enduring values and principles of civilisation. The mind and heart of the reader uplifted.

The books are without the scholarship that we associate with scholarly works.

The students are sometimes confused about the different types of writing professors demand from them.

Part of the problem of faltering communication in speech and writing among students is traceable to the academic writing they are exposed to in college. Abstract words, wordy sentences, musty paragraphs, saying nothing. Yet the study of English grammar is the study of the speech habits of accomplished speakers and writers. Clearly, academic writing is not one of the best examples of communication – the seamless sharing of information, feelings, attitudes and values.

The other reason for the halting manner of communication is the overdependence on textbooks in the years of basic education.

While textbooks in high school don’t have the academic language associated with the reading list on university courses, they lack the simplicity, clarity and lucidity in writing that employers want.

There is nothing wrong with textbooks. They bring together, in a sequential manner, the content that ought to be learned to equip students with the mental, physical and moral orientations essential for the existence of the nation or society.

However, textbooks are a means to an end. They cannot optimally meet that end.

Perhaps the only subjects where students are exposed to writing style of the kind recommended by employers is Literature in English and Fasihi ya Kiswahili. Students meet novels, plays, poetry, and passages in comprehension exercises in both languages that were not written for students. The books in question are about six in total which ought to be read intensively in forms Three and Four.

With this exception, all that students read or study are textbooks purely for information on the prescribed syllabus.

The English language syllabi under the 8.4.4 system of education that is being phased out recommends that schools expose learners to extensive reading of fictional and nonfictional works.

There is a need for school systems to recommend books of outstanding literary value for purposes of extensive reading throughout the 12 years of learning. It is the books – great fictional and nonfictional works – that will cultivate the communication skills the world wants of students.

An education where students don’t undertake extensive reading is a scam. Schools subvert the great aims of education when they create a teaching and learning environment that leaves no room for students to undertake extensive reading.

School leaders and teachers ought to take this as part of their obligation to the young generation: to throw at the feet of these students the cultural and intellectual heritage of mankind – across time and civilisations – in the school library.

 The writer is a Communication Specialist.