How was the Floating University, the only one where Marie Curie could study?

In 1883 it was virtually forbidden to be Polish, or at least to practice as such.

Poland, as an independent state, had not existed since 1795, when it was invaded and divided by its three powerful neighbours: Russia, Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Russia got the most and the capital, Warsaw.

Initially, the Poles had a certain degree of autonomy, but this evaporated with every attempt to regain independence.

After the January 1863 uprising, the tsarist authorities had had enough and were determined to turn the Poles into ‘good Russians’, loyal to the one who was also the King of Poland: the Russian Emperor Alexander II.

So this time they not only executed captured insurgents and sent tens of thousands of Poles to prison camps in Central Russia and Siberia.

They dismantled all autonomous administrative and political institutions, the judiciary and banking system, and attacked the Catholic Church with harsh repression. one of the main pillars of Polish identity and tradition.

But what better way to banish the Polish national consciousness from the minds and hearts than through education and culture?

Russification

If the Poles never learned as children what had incited the adults to revolt, the future was assured.

Subsequently, 12 separate censorship bureaus were implemented, which banned the publication and performance of the works of Polish playwrights, poets and novelists.

Passages referring to the history of Poland were removed from the books and Russian became the official language of instruction in schools, where students were not allowed to use their mother tongue, even in private conversations.

In 1869, the two main Polish institutions, the Royal University of Warsaw and the Warsaw Main School, were closed and a Russian university was established.

The desire to Russify education had serious consequences the quality, which dropped drastically.

In this environment, the informal education system slowly but surely developed.

At any cost

Clandestine education began with secret societies of high school students that sprang up in the early 1880s despite the risk of imprisonment and heavy fines.

In these ‘student circles’ subjects were studied that were excluded from the official study plans; Not only Polish history and literature, but also Western European positivist and scientific thinking.

Thus, in addition to the works of Polish writers, there were Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and other authors whose works were banned or unavailable, so each circle strove to create its own secret library of rare and forbidden books.

In towns and cities, teachers held private lessons in their homes, while in villages campaigns to train farmers were disguised as “beekeeping societies” and “sports societies”.

In Warsaw, this type of education took on a more permanent and organized form in 1884 with the Society for Clandestine Education, which used advanced communication networks to warn of any danger and employ a relatively large number of teachers.

In 1905, this association educated about half of the number of high school students attending public schools.

And since the situation regarding higher education was equally difficult and impossible for women, by that time, an equally peculiar institution was already 20 years old.

From here to there

Initially, some called it “the college for girls” because the students were exclusively female.

Women were banned from university, but that did not stop them from wanting to educate themselves, not only because of the hunger for knowledge and emancipation ideas that came from Western Europe.

Many were widowed after the January Uprising and were the sole breadwinners for their families; without education it was impossible to get jobs with reasonable wages.

In 1882, overcoming all obstacles, a few groups of female students they began to meet in secret in order to get the higher education they so longed for.

Three years later, at the initiative of Jadwiga Szczawinska, a young scholar, the Floating or Flying University took on a more systematic character, with its own curriculum, budget and a centralized organization with a board of trustees.

The name reflected the fact that classes were held in private apartments and the venue changed frequentlyas both teachers and students risked punishments including imprisonment, deportation to Siberia and heavy fines if discovered.

One in 5,000

The university was divided into four departments: social sciences, philology-history, pedagogy and natural sciences.

The full study period lasted 5 to 6 years with 8 to 11 hours of lectures per week.

It included more than 30 eminent scholars such as the sociologist Ludwik Krzywicki, the philosopher Adam Mahrburg and the historian Wladyslaw Smolenski, among others.

Despite the risks, the university became very popular, not only among women.

Shortly after its establishment, it attracted a sizeable population of male students who flocked to it to, in addition to lecturing on the forbidden subjects, the level of academic excellence was higher than at the Russian University in Warsaw.

According to historian Bohdan Cywinski, the number of students wishing to enter university in the 1889/90 academic year reached nearly a thousand, far exceeding the university’s capacity.

The total number of graduates between 1885 and 1905 is estimated at 5,000, including Maria Sldodowska Curie, who would go on to become the world-renowned, two-time Nobel Prize-winning chemist and physicist.

Other celebrities who attended or worked at the Floating University included the pioneer of the struggle for children’s rights Janusz Korczak, the writer Zofia Nałkowska and the anthropologist Maria Czaplicka.

An ending with an ellipsis

The Floating University existed as an illegal institution until 1906, when, in the wave of liberalization in education that followed the school strikes in the Russian Partition, it was transformed into the semi-legal Society for Academic Studies, or TKN for the Polish acronym .

Although never granted university status and harassed by the authorities, the Society survived until 1918, when Poland regained its sovereignty.

In 1919, the work and traditions of the Floating University and TKN continued as a public university – the Polish Free University.

But while that’s the end of the original story, his spirit would be reborn in two other moments of darkness.

The most dangerous of the iterations existed after the invasion of Poland in 1939, with the German and Soviet occupation of the area.

According to the Nazi racial theories, the Slavs did not need higher education, since the entire nation would become serfs of the German race..

Education that did not serve as a means of submission must be abolished.

Educated people, who had an entrenched sense of national identity, had to be eliminated lest they “contaminate” the rest of the population or forge a strong resistance movement.

But the remnants of the Polish intelligentsia, evading deportation to concentration camps or death, did exactly what the Nazis feared: they educated another generation of Poles.

By reviving the tradition of the Floating University, they created an impressive complete underground education system, consisting of elementary, middle and university levels, which educated hundreds of thousands of people.

Even the Catholic Church operated clandestine seminaries, and so did one of its beneficiaries Karol Wojtyla, who would become Pope John Paul II.

The young people who fought in the largest civil uprising against Nazi Germany, the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, were students of that Floating University.

no more flights

The names “Floating University” and “TKN” were also used during the times of communist rule in the Polish People’s Republic, when the curriculum again became an instrument of politics, and much of Polish history was censored in an attempt to erase the history of the Polish-Russian conflicts.

The tradition was revived first by the Free Polish University Society active in Warsaw since 1957, and then from 1977 by the new Floating University and Science Courses Society, supported by Polish dissidents.

In that case he gave lectures, mainly Law, Economics, Politics and Sociology, but no diplomas were awarded.

Several participants were harassed by the authorities, but the university remained active until the proclamation of martial law in Poland in 1981, which, while designed to crush the Solidarity labor movement, also suppressed these academic activities.

That was only in 1989, when peaceful elections finally brought democracy to Poland the need for flying or floating universities finally came to an end.