For Mercy Wanjiru Weru, the expression “life begins at forty” is more than a cliché.

This weekend a new chapter in the life of the 41-year-old single mother of three begins when she joins Form One at Kenya High School.

Joining the premier national school whose alumni list reads like the who-is-who in Kenya is in itself not a mean achievement, but Ms Weru is set to go a step further by entering the institution’s history books as the oldest Form One student to ever be admitted.

Former nominated MP Njoki Ndung’u, lawyer Betty Murungi and musician Achieng’ Abura are some of the school’s former students.

Ms Weru came into the limelight after scoring 379 marks in last year’s Kenya Certificate of Primary Education.

Yet this will not be her first weekend in a secondary school – it will be the third attempt at receiving secondary education.

In 1986, Ms Weru, then 14 years old, sat her KCPE at Thangathi Primary School in Mukurwe-ini. She scored 426 out of 700 marks and was admitted to Chinga Girls School in Nyeri.

Marriage did not work

However, after two terms she dropped out due to lack of fees and got married shortly thereafter. But her marriage did not work. Ms Weru then moved to Kajiado to start life afresh.

Without an education, getting a good job was an uphill task. Dissatisfied, she made the second attempt at secondary education, enrolling in Form One at AIC Girls Secondary School, Kajiado.

However, she failed to cope and dropped out after one term. “The syllabus had changed and it was difficult for me to keep up. I decided to go back to primary school to get up-to-date with the new syllabus and prepare myself for secondary school,” Ms Weru recalls.

Seeking a better understanding of the curriculum, she sought a fresh start, joining Standard Seven at Kangurwe Primary School in Mukurwe-ini under the Free Primary Education programme.

She says it was the better choice, the other option being adult literacy classes, which local education officials wanted her to join. However, she refused to leave primary school.

“I could not get what I wanted at the adult education classes, where people attend lessons once a week and are taught basic literacy. I wanted to attend a conventional school and follow the regular curriculum, which would not have been possible at the adult classes,” Ms Weru explains.

Her case once more puts the country’s adult education system on the spotlight. The ministry of Education seems to be waking up to the reality that rising cases of adults joining primary and secondary schools is a sign of a failed adult education system.

The man who started the directorate of Adult Education in 1979, Prof David Macharia, says Ms Weru or even the late Kimani Maruge – who earned Kenya a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest pupil in the world – reflect the education system’s failure.

“It shows we have challenges in sustaining adult literacy skills,” says the University of Nairobi education professor.

Ideally, says Prof Macharia, adults should not be sharing the same class with learners young enough to be their grandchildren, particularly in primary and secondary schools.

Instead of mixing adults with children in class, he argues, the government should organise separate classes for them, more or less like the current adult learners’ classes developed in Kenyan universities.

The Education ministry concedes the challenge. According to the PS, Prof James ole Kiyiapi, Ms Weru and other adults joining secondary school must be treated as special students.

On Thursday evening, the PS led a team of education officials to Kenya High to ensure that the school was prepared to host Ms Weru.

“We want to ensure that special arrangements have been made to accommodate her; we do not want a situation where she will share the same dormitory with girls young enough to be her daughters,” said the ministry’s communications officer, Ms Virginia Wangari.

Prof Macharia concurs. “Adults in school need an environment where they can be handled with dignity and respect befitting their age, not where they are regarded as spectacles,” says the don.

According to Prof Macharia, the way forward would be roping in the country’s 240,000 teachers and preparing them to handle adult learners before opening all public schools to adults: either during school holidays, or in the evening. This, he argues, would see more adults joining school.

But Ms Weru says she will not need any special treatment, and that she will fit in just like the rest of her schoolmates despite her age.

The school principal, Ms Rosemary Saina, agrees, noting that Ms Weru is a student like any other and will be treated as such.

“There is no need to sensationalise Mercy’s story. To us Mercy is a student; there is nothing extraordinary about her and we do not foresee any problems,” says Ms Saina.

Yet, in reality, Ms Weru is far from your ordinary teenager on her first day in high school. To begin with, she will have to balance between school work and the heavy burden of parenthood.

She still has a four-year-old daughter back home to think about, and a son, who is a third-year Bachelor of Commerce student at Egerton University.

Being the sole breadwinner, she will be struggling against distractions of parenthood to concentrate on her studies.

Then there is the school fees burden for herself and her children. She has been struggling to pay her son’s college fees but she now has to cater for her own fees, too.

Luckily, her area MP Kabando wa Kabando convinced the local Constituency Development Fund committee to foot the mother’s Form One fees.

But it is clear, like many other Kenyan adult learners forced to join regular primary and secondary school classes by a weak adult education curriculum, that the mother of three will have to surmount many challenges before her dream of studying medicine at Harvard University comes true.

Adapted from the Nation.