'One day a poster announcing the preparatory course at the university appeared in a village. Pokusa [surname, "desire" in Polish] was among the first to enrol. He was accepted after passing an exam. Now he is one of the best students! -- All you need is a good will -- he explains.' That is how a local newspaper in 1953 encouraged peasant children to study at the University of Lódz, a model socialist university established in 1945 in Poland's biggest industrial city. This article examines press discourses and a new configuration of meanings. Post-war transformation introduced a deep reconstruction of a social imaginary and the creation of educational desires among the working classes. The article traces the creation of new subjects and discourses, and the emancipatory potential for a proletarian reader to reconstruct how working-class children were encouraged to enter universities. It also traces how a model student and university were conceptualised in the daily press.