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Firstly, the absurdity of the situation! Such an old man sitting next to much younger people as they all go through their ‘prep’ is surely rather unusual and enough to make you look hard and ask yourself if all of this is really only meant to be a publicity stunt, a set up or some kind of sick joke? After all, how can somebody of such mature age be placed in a school situation when there are other, more appropriate ways, of completing a life-long education?
Yet, when I read the caption under the photo it made much more sense. Here was a man who was initially denied an education all those years ago, and because of the new system in Kenya he now had the opportunity to get back what he had missed. (I don’t suppose he had to wear the uniform or even sit in the seats, but clearly this experience, however humorous or embarrassing to others, was certainly giving him great pride). These days, in many countries, there are many other alternatives to the classroom approach for older students, including those that need help with literacy programmes. Hence the need for various adult and non-formal systems to be put in place, but then how do you stop those determined folk who just want to see what they have missed?
Indeed, all of this reminded me of my early days in Botswana where quite often the teacher came across one or two pupils in a class that were obviously much older and far more mature that the rest of the so called ‘children’. Remember that these were the days before too many rules and regulations governed local admissions, so that if you had the money to pay for fees and you had the necessary PSLE results, you could often get a place in Form 1. Interestingly, nobody in the admin usually said anything about such cases, and there was often no information or instructions for confused class teachers. So that the fact that student number so and so, was actually aged 31, but was in a class of pupils where the average age was about 15 years was deemed irrelevant. (I suppose part of the problem was that in many situations students had been less than honest, or perhaps vague about their dates of birth, or that sympathetic head teachers, seeing there was a need to admit such pupils on merit, often turned a blind eye on the basis that this was a potentially keen student and we the school and the authorities should not stand in their way.
Nevertheless, such pupils did take some getting used to — not that they were badly behaved. But simply because your eyes tended to take notice of such long limbed fellows, with dark beards and pot bellies looking at you from the front bench, with knees that were tucked in under chins since they did not really fit well into the seats! Likewise, there was also something rather unusual about large, mature women squeezed into small uniforms that make them fairly noticeable, even to the most inexperienced teacher. And while you may have been tempted to ask what they were doing in Form Three rather than looking after their two or three children, strict levels of professionalism meant that such things were not, after all, your business. The bottom line being they were there to learn and you were there to teach them! So get on with it and leave the psychological problems to others! Fortunately times have changed but older readers out there, will, of course, easily identify with such ‘situations’ since it was not so unusual, especially for men, to have been almost forgotten about at the cattlepost and then rushed into primary and on to secondary education.
‘Late starters’ they may well have been, but from my experience many of them, like the Kenyan we read about recently, were extremely grateful for the chance and thus were determined to make it a success, however odd or embarrassing it may or may not have been. With the coming of strict age restrictions by the MOE such things are long gone. Today, the practice is to fill up secondary classes with much younger children of similar chronological ages and not with their mums and dads as well!
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