Women who Prime

Abstract

‘Students are like entrails,’ one student remarked, ‘and the Polish education system like a sausage machine. We’re filled up with lots of cereals and very little meat.’ At the English Department of the University in Lódź, at which I taught in 1988/9, the majority of students are women, many of whom go on to teach in local secondary schools. The building itself was once a secondary school and during the war it was used by the Gestapo. In the classrooms students sit still behind desks in rows: the round table is absent here. Classes begin at 8.00 a.m. and end at 6.00 p.m.; there are regular tests and examinations as students are graded and sorted; and there is no open access to the small department library. Thus students have little time and few resources to explore their own ideas. First two university teachers talk of their lives, followed by some of the students they teach.