Inside a Form One class, a teacher is taking a group of students through a mathematics class. Today, they are learning decimals, converting 35 out of a thousand into decimals, for example.
It is a class in a normal government-run school, yet this is not a normal form one class.
The teacher, Mr Shem Agao, asks a question. Hands are raised, a flash of wedding and engagement rings.
Most of the students are in their 30s, and already doing relatively well in the world. Twenty out of the 30 students are women, most of them married and working in town. Some have parked their cars in the school’s parking lot. At least two of them are in the Armed Forces.
Unlike Kimani Maruge, who made it to international limelight as the oldest pupil in the world at 84, before he died in August 2009, these students go about their classes quietly, shunning the limelight. They do not want their photos taken, they say.
The class itself is tucked somewhere inside St Peter Claver’s Primary School, Nairobi, one of the few government-run high schools for adults. And the learners here are not your ordinary students.
“Some are soldiers straight from the barracks who came here to get a better grade, others are policemen,” says Dickson Ouma, an English and Geography teacher in the school.
“Most of them scored weak grades when they sat form four examination; they now want the Bs to allow them join college, and eventually earn promotions,” Mr Ouma says.
The school has 170 adult learners — most of them working men and women who want a second shot at the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education.
It is to such a secondary school that Kimani Maruge would have proceeded to, had he lived long enough to clear his primary school.
And if the government invested more in adults who want to go back to high school, even Mercy Njeri — the 40-year-old student who joined form one at Kenya High School earlier this year — would not share class with girls young enough to be her daughters.
But the government is clearly slow in realising that an increasing number of adults want a second chance in high school.
For example, the ministry of education is yet to post full-time adult education teachers at St Peter Claver’s, three decades after taking over the school from the Catholic Church. All of the 11 teachers are volunteers drawn from the civil service and the Nairobi City Council.
The government pays the volunteer teachers a modest Sh2,000 per month for their time and effort.
The learners have no library, and no science laboratories. Yet they, too, are expected to sit for the same national examinations as the regular KCSE classes.
Education permanent secretary James ole Kiyiapi concedes that much of the current adult education curriculum is still stuck to the 1980s, when adults were taught basic reading and writing skills.
“It was initially focused on eliminating illiteracy, but now we are seeing an interesting new trend where adults want primary and secondary school certificates,” Prof Kiyiapi says.
The ministry, he says, does not have sufficient data to determine exactly how many adults want to go back to school.
“We do not know how serious the demand is, but we are trying to come up with a parallel programme for adults, we do not want a situation where adults compete with their children in schools,” says the PS.
St Peter Claver’s is one of the numerous pilot projects for parallel KCSE programs for adult learners.
In 2009, the school produced two B grades.
There were more B grades in English, Geography, History, religious education and business studies.
And if the government increases funding for similar schools across the country, teachers in this school say, more adults will be giving their children a run for top grades in KCSE.
