Marie Curie Got Her Start at a Secret University for Women

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-secret-polish-university-for-women-where-marie-curie-got-her-start

by lermontov • 10 years ago

221 52 10 years ago

atlasobscura.com

Myrmornis2• 10 years ago

The one-person stage play "Manya - A Living History of Marie Curie" is fantastic incidentally.

There's a clip here; I don't know if a full recording is available. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8GTXNkkFPs

inputcoffee2• 10 years ago

I cannot imagine doing this today, although there are still places that need a secret university. However, I wonder if we have the solution, at much less risk.

I wonder if, 30 years from now when a whole new generation has grown up, we will discuss poor countries (or, say, people under the Taliban, or in North Korea) learning from the Khan Academy, Coursera and the like in the same way.

"What was it like, mom?"

"Well, kid, they didn't have these fancy holographs. First you had to find a really good 'connection' ..."

lumberjack• 10 years ago

Unlikely. Those people don't have the luxury of time needed to put any serious efforts towards their education.

inputcoffee2• 10 years ago

That's a very good point.

I suppose they would spend most of their time looking for work or a way to make a living.

There might be a thin slice of people, just below the wealthy but above the desperately poor who just need the opportunity.

ben_jones2• 10 years ago

Anthropologically speaking their was a lot of free time in ancient agrarian societies. I wouldn't be surprised if their is in fact a fair chunk of time that could be diverted to education if the resources were both available and accessible.

From a study of modern Asian and Pacific "free time" [1]:

"People in Cambodia (note the caveat of age – the sample is of those 5 years and older) and Pakistan have the largest amounts of free time (Figure 1.4). Cambodians have more than 16 hours of free time per day (1 000 minutes), whereas in Mongolia, which is the country where people work the longest, people have only 13 hours (800 minutes) of free time. Generally speaking, men have slightly more free time than women (Figure 1.5), reflecting longer total working time for women (Figure 1.1)."[2]

[1]: "Free time" is defined as time not spent working, and can be subdivided as "personal care time" and "leisure time". Furthermore, personal care includes time spent sleeping and accounts for > 3/5 of "free time" usage in most cases.

[2] https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/49306957.pdf

It's a really interesting article. It leads to the corollary of "How and why do people in poorer countries spend their leisure time differently then those in wealthier ones". My personal opinion is that the differences between both demographics where narrow down over time such as "Both poor and rich spend an average of 2hrs/day on Netflix".

benbreen3• 10 years ago

You'd be surprised. A good friend of mine is an Afghan who grew up sleeping on a dirt floor alongside his 5 siblings. When he was 15, his parents sent him off to their family village in order to fight the Taliban.

I first met him at our PhD program orientation in the US. He speaks four languages and and is one of the most well educated people I've ever met. Granted, he's an exceptional person but by no means of a unique one.

Edit: can't help sharing something that just happened last week, I was with my wife in Athens, where she had just started her thesis research, interviewing Afghan refugees in one of the big Greek refugee camps. She befriends a 17 year old Afghan kid named Javad, no family or money, speaks nothing but Dari, and one of the first things he asks her is "can you send me a PDF of an intermediate to advanced level mechanical engineering textbook?" We're planning on sending him an ipad with a bunch of PDFs and sci hub articles.

I realize these are just two personal anecdotes but they have definitely changed my mind on this subject. Curious people tend to be curious regardless of their life circumstances.

mikerichards• 10 years ago

How tired are you after a days of works. Many of us are mentally drained, which we feel as physically drained after work.

Not only that, but physical activity plus our mental strain screws with our cortisol levels.

Personally, I used to work out a lot. Then I realized I was getting crabby all the time. I think I have cortisol problems, but not sure.

Anybody refer me to research with stress and and physical workouts and not getting enough sleep?

shas3• 10 years ago

Severe sampling bias. News in the West is focused on all the bad things that happen there. That doesn't mean that there can't be a small percentage of the population that has the time and motivation to educate themselves. I've met my share of Syrians, Libyans, and Iraqi graduate students who were educated in and lived through pretty difficult times pre- and post- dictator-overthrow.

calibraxis• 10 years ago

These "clandestine courses" certainly exist in rich nations, and are secretly held during lunch and in private homes. For example, to avoid bosses knowing.

Skilled human tutors, free from school/university bureaucracy, can get into your head and figure out effective ways to inspire learning. Leads to faster and surer learning, for those lucky enough to have it.

roywiggins2• 10 years ago

It also helps that if you're seeking it out, you're going to be a lot more motivated than if it's compulsory education.

natural219• 10 years ago

Interesting. I see this going on all of the time; YCombinator is a great parallel example of, while not exactly clandestine, non-institutional education collecting great minds and educating young people in an environment of relative obscurity and non-intervention from the greater culture that hosts it. I expect _more_ of this in the future.

dominotw• 10 years ago

i doubt north Koreans have access to khan academy.

roywiggins2• 10 years ago

If Western films make it through, it's not hard to imagine Korean educational DVDs getting in.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/22/north-korea...

pjc502• 10 years ago

People find the need for clandestine sex education in plenty of parts of the West today, where the official curriculum seeks to maintain ancient prejudices.

Mz2• 10 years ago

Education for the sake of education, for people with a desire to learn. This pretty much has to be better than education for the purpose of credentialing.

ajuc2• 10 years ago

They were mostly nobles (Poland had lots of these - almost 5% of population) or rich middle class women before feminism (so - no need to work).

cema• 10 years ago

Not necessarily no need to work, but more importantly, easily available free time to spend on learning (or anything else).

mamon• 10 years ago

First of all, number of nobles in Poland was much bigger, some say even 10% of population, which made it mostly the customary title, rarely followed by an actual wealth.

More importantly, since Poland was under Russian and German rule nobles were often dispossesed and persecuted.

Maria Skłodowska-Curie herself had to earn her living (mostly by being private tutor), as did her husband, parents and others.

So no, education was not rich women's entertainment, it was necessity.

Mz2• 10 years ago

If you read the book "More work for mother," which details 300 years of the history of housework, women have long been saddled with about 60 hours a week of housework. In modern times, if a woman works a full time job of 40 hours a week, that only falls to about 40 hours per week of housework.

I seriously doubt most of these women were living a life of leisure. Additionally, let's assume you are right: How on earth does that rebut my comment about educating people who desire to learn? Because surely the leisure class could have been bar hopping and throwing or attending wild parties instead of trying to learn something in spite of it being against the rules to get an education.

kaikai2• 10 years ago

I worked on a project called Free Skool that's essentially the same thing. Even in wealthy, "free" countries, there are plenty of people that don't have access to educational resources, and can benefit from sharing knowledge with their peers. We had classes on everything from maths and philosophy to sewing and figure drawing. Education shouldn't be something that only happens when you have a ton of money and years of free time to spend on a university degree.

KajMagnus• 10 years ago

Do you have a website? Would you like to link to it (or send me via email?)

kaikai2• 10 years ago

I worked on Free Skool Santa Cruz (http://santacruz.freeskool.org/) but we stopped a few years back. It's entirely decentralized, and there's a bunch of projects around the world. Here's a wiki page that has more links and resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchistic_free_school

ekianjo• 10 years ago

to a post World War II effort by Communist Russia, who once again took control of Poland

Inaccurate - it did not wait for post-WW2. Russia invaded already the second half Poland as soon as 1939 (2 weeks after Germany) and on top of that, without declaring War.

syngrog66• 10 years ago

on a related note, why every American & European should pay strong attention to Trump & Putin at the moment, and try to collectively make the wisest decision we can make, in each of our respective nations. because all the physical laws of the universe which allowed 30's/40's Hitler/Stalin to do what they did are still true and in effect today, and many of the same political/psychological mechanisms as well.

afarrell• 10 years ago

But we have a greater knowledge of the physical laws of the universe which allows us to build far more powerful explosives and deploy them far more quickly.

ch4ck3• 10 years ago

That was not Russia. That was Soviet Union. Those parts of Poland became parts of Ukrainian and Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republics (Western Ukraine, Western Belarus). Most of them are still parts of Ukraine and Belarus today. In 1938 Poland invaded Czechoslovakia together with Germany and Hungary to "protect" Polish population in Zaolzie. In 1939 Soviet Union "protected" Ukrainian and Byelorussian population. In 1938 Stalin's plan to fight Nazi Germany and protect Slavic Czechoslovakia was rejected by the West.

jazzyk• 10 years ago

Let's not rewrite history here: Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. Hungary and Poland annexed small parts of ethnically mixed areas to their respective countries

jsf666• 10 years ago

Zaolzie was stolen from Poland by the Czechs around 1920 (the Polish-Bolshevik war)

retro64• 10 years ago

In 1938 Poland invaded Czechoslovakia together with Germany and Hungary to "protect" Polish population in Zaolzie

I have a keen interest in WWII, so I had to do some brief research into this claim as I was surprised and had never heard it before. A few minutes of browsing seems to indicate there is a history of dispute in the area. This area was apparently given to the Poles as part of Versailles Treaty and the Czech's took it back by force in 1920.

I now I have some reading to do.

belorn• 10 years ago

Looking through the sources, its bit unclear if she joined before the various pro-education groups were united into a single secret university open for both sexes, or after. Before 1885 she was tutoring, but I can't find any reference if thats was connected with the university.

c2prods• 10 years ago

Fascinating how outsiders change the world. Despite their progress, it should be food for thought for our modern-era universities too.

Marie Curie Got Her Start at a Secret University for Women

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