Educational institutions

LINDA WALTON

Simply defined, “education” means the transmission of learning both within and across generations. As David Christian has argued, collective learning and the ability to reproduce it over generations distinguish humans from other species.¹ Collective learning encompasses a wide range of experience transmitted in both oral and written forms, as well as through practice.

Achieving a fully global perspective on educational institutions between 500 and 1500 is problematic because of the profound imbalance among ^[142] sources, both primary and secondary.

Despite varying historical experiences and uneven sources, however, it is nonetheless possible to establish a globally inclusive analytical framework. This chapter demonstrates that the organization and transmission of know­ledge reflect not only diverse cultural values and traditions but also differing relationships between states, which both utilized and controlled knowledge, and also relationships among elites, whose status depended on their access to knowledge and role in its transmission.

During this period, the most potent and ubiquitous form of knowledge was religious. Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam all spawned institutions to spread their teachings. As the religions expanded across Afro-Eurasia, these institutions were increasingly harnessed to the goals of states and empires as well as to the aspirations of elites. In regions of the globe not yet penetrated by any of the world religions, such as sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas, formal educational institutions sanctioned by religion under the control of priestly elites also served the needs of states.

Confucianism and educational institutions in East Asia

Confucian thinkers regarded education as essential to the cultivation of human nature, and envisioned the ideal society as one governed by scholars. Education as a marker of both status and power was institutionalized in the civil service examination system, which was controlled by the state. Thus access to knowledge determined social status and political power, defining the scholar-official elite of imperial China. Both Confucian ideas and the examination system were also adopted by emerging states on the Korean peninsula, in the Japanese archipelago, and in Vietnam.

China

Systematic efforts to recruit and select officials by means of examinations date from the Tang dynasty (618-907). Tang rulers adopted the examination system to control powerful aristocratic clans, using the Confucian ideal of government by scholars to justify selection for office through examinations. The examination system subverted hereditary privilege by creating a state- controlled process to determine eligibility for court ranks and offices. Tang examinations awarded degrees based on mastery of the Confucian classical tradition, plus poetry and policy debates. The Tang Imperial University provided a scholarly resource for the government and a place for prospect­ive bureaucrats to be trained. Beyond the capital, education took place largely through private tutoring, or in Buddhist monastic institutions (see below).

Throughout the Tang period only members of the aristocracy had the wealth and leisure to acquire the education necessary to pass the examin­ations. In the subsequent Song dynasty (960-1279), however, the examin­ations did foster significant social change.

By the latter part of the Song, changes in Confucianism began to affect the examination system. In the eleventh century, Neo-Confucian thinkers turned their attention to the relationship between humans and the cosmos, expanding classical Confucian concern with good government to a new metaphysical realm. Zhu Xi (1130-1200) sought to create a synthesis of these interpretations of the classics and promoted his ideas of moral self-cultivation through teaching in private academies, which flourished during the Southern Song (1127-1279). Academy founders criticized the examinations as a perver­sion of the true purpose of education because students studied only for success in the examinations rather than for self-cultivation. In the end, however, academies succumbed to the same impulse of examination prepar­ation, although they did promote the notion that the literati elite - whether or not they succeeded in passing the examinations - occupied a cultural niche that set them apart from commoners.

Despite the imposition of foreign rule in the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), there was a high degree of continuity in educational institutions.

Korea

Confucian ideas spread to the Korean peninsula well before the mid­seventh century unification by Silla. Silla's state structure was modeled on that of Tang China, and although Buddhism was dominant, a Confu­cian academy for the education of officials was established in the capital. A state examination system was introduced briefly in the late eighth century, but soon abandoned. Although Buddhism continued to be influ­ential during the succeeding Koryo dynasty (918-1392), Confucianism was promoted by the state. A Chinese-style examination system established to recruit government officials included poetry along with Confucian texts.^[143] By the second half of the eleventh century, private schools flour­ished along with state-sponsored schools for the preparation of candidates.^[144]

Koryo had close relations with contemporary Song China, and after the disruption of the Mongol conquest, integration into the Mongol Empire brought Korean Confucians into closer contact with intellectual develop­ments in Yuan China, especially Neo-Confucianism.

Japan

As in Korea, the tribal foundations of aristocratic society shaped the reception of Chinese ideas and educational institutions in Japan. Chinese influence on the Japanese archipelago became substantial in the seventh century and peaked during the Nara period (712-784) with the emergence of a centralized state. Japan's rulers set forth a comprehensive plan for an educational system, including a central university, and civil service examinations. Examination content drew on the Confucian classics, with emphasis on philosophy and history. The model of Confucian education and the examination system borrowed from Tang China were modified to suit the needs of state and society in eighth-century Japan. Admission to the university was determined primarily by the father's rank.^[145] Examinations were ancillary to hereditary privilege, which assigned court rank according to ancestry, as in Tang China. Scions of the aristocracy therefore did not flock to the university, but lower- ranking courtiers and sons of provincial officials did, since they could elevate their status by performing well in the examinations. Unlike China, however, the examination system did not survive long enough to produce social change.

The Heian period (794-1185) saw the rise of an aristocratic court culture relatively isolated from Chinese influence, and by the latter part of the Heian period, the university and examination system existed in name only. As warriors expanded their role in society, Confucian-based education fell even more out of favor in the Kamakura (1185-1333) and Ashikaga periods (1336-1573), when Buddhist monastic institutions were the main repositories of learning.

Vietnam

Unlike both Korea and Japan, which selectively adopted and adapted Chinese institutions, Vietnam's incorporation into the Chinese Empire between the second century bce and the tenth century ce brought a millennium of direct and sustained transmission of Chinese culture into the area, along with a degree of political unification. The Sino-Vietnamese state centered on the Red River Delta, where northern officials absorbed local leaders into the imperial hierarchy and, aided by Chinese immigrants, introduced Chinese- style schools. Once independent of Chinese control in the tenth century, Dai Viet (“Great Viet”) nonetheless implemented a Chinese-style civil service examination, although students were tested on their knowledge of Buddhism and Daoism as well as Confucianism. Buddhism remained influential, and Buddhist temples provided monastic education. But Confucian models became more prominent as economic growth favored private landowners with modest wealth who sought opportunities for government office through education for the civil service examinations. Educated men in Dai Viet became familiar with Neo-Confucianism, transmitted through both Chinese immigration and the circulation of texts.^[146]

Invasion by Ming China (1407-27) intensified Chinese influence, and Confucian schools were founded for the first time in the countryside. Neo-Confucian ideas were also transmitted and promoted in contrast to the classical Confucianism previously favored by Dai Viet literati.^[147] After the expul­sion of the Ming, key features of Ming administration were retained, including schools. Dai Viet's first orthodox Chinese-style examinations began in the 1440s, and Neo-Confucianism prevailed as officially sanctioned state ideology. Examinations became the chief means of recruitment for government offices, and by 1500 as many as 30,000 men took the triennial regional examinations. Literacy became a necessary qualification for holding local offices and for economic benefits such as exemption from obligatory unpaid labor.

Buddhism and educational institutions in Asia

Across East Asia Confucianism placed supreme value on humanistic learning, cultivated through study of the Confucian classics as training for government officials. Between 500 and 1500, however, China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam also belonged to a Buddhist world. Although Buddhism never challenged state power in East Asia, Buddhist values did compete with Confucian ones, and Buddhist monastic institutions complemented Confucian schools. Training monks and nuns to read sutras (scriptures) and transmit teachings to lay believers required substantial investment in education. Beginning with its place of origin in the Himalayas, everywhere Buddhism took root, monastic schools were established that provided both religious instruction and community educational resources.

South Asia

Organized education in South Asia came with the Buddhist and Jain reform movements that arose in the sixth century bce on the northern fringes of the Gangetic plain and in the foothills of the Himalayas. In contrast to the dominant Vedic religion, whose teachings of the Vedas and other texts were orally transmitted from teacher to student, these new monastic religions relied on both oral and written transmission of their teachings in the insti­tutional environment of monastic communities.^[148]

Building on a monastic foundation, the most famous Buddhist university was founded at Nalanda in the mid-fifth to mid-sixth century and flourished until the Muslim conquest in the early thirteenth century (see Figure 5.1). Patrons of Buddhism such as the emperor Harsha (r. 606-47) supported Nalanda with endowments, and tax revenues were allocated to the support of the university and its several thousand students and teachers, who lived in residential colleges. Nalanda offered instruction not only in Mahayana Bud­dhism, but in other Buddhist sects as well, along with the Vedas, philosophy, and secular sciences such as logic, Sanskrit grammar, and medicine. Large libraries endowed by rulers and other wealthy patrons at this and other Buddhist universities housed comprehensive collections of both religious and secular materials. These institutions attracted many students from abroad, including Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan.

Figure 5.1 Ruins of Buddhist university at Nalanda (photograph by Tansen Sen)

The institutionalization of Vedic education was likely influenced by the Buddhist model of monastic schools attached to temples. Vedic colleges attached to many temples were supported by rulers who allocated tax income from farming villages and also by wealthy donors. Emphasis on oral instruction and the primacy of the teacher-student relationship, however, meant that upper-caste Brahmins continued to control Vedic education. But with the thirteenth-century spread of the bhakti movement of personal devotion that rejected caste distinctions, support for Brahmin-led Vedic institutions of learning decreased and bhakti temples assumed many of the same educational functions for students from a broader social background.

Both Buddhist and Vedic educational institutions served the needs of rulers by training students in secular skills useful to the administration of states and empires in South Asia. Rulers may have patronized these insti­tutions as devotional acts, but there were practical motives behind their support as well. Imperial patronage of Buddhist monastic institutions like­wise characterized the relationship between state, religion, and education in East Asia.

East Asia

By 500, Buddhism was well established in China, and institutions of Buddhist education began to flourish. As elsewhere, Buddhist education focused on the sangha, the community of monks and nuns. In separate men's and women’s houses, novices were trained in Buddhist texts, in liturgy, and in the regulations of monastic life. Buddhist temples and monasteries also provided lay educational resources by teaching basic literacy as well as preaching Buddhism; Confucian texts were part of monastic education along with Buddhist sutras.^[149] Buddhist priests joined Confucian literati as part of the educated elite. Clerical examinations in scriptural exegesis, modeled on the civil service examinations, were introduced in the Tang both to control the size of the sangha and to legitimize the clergy as a body of religious specialists.

Buddhism also had an important influence on education because of its role in the development of printing. Monasteries maintained manuscript libraries used by clerics, but woodblock printing made it possible to expand the number of scripture copies available and thus made Buddhist teachings accessible to a wider literate audience. The desire of Buddhists to spread their beliefs inspired the technology that enabled the teachings of the Buddha to be transmitted more widely. Buddhism’s relationship to printing was similar to that of Protestant Christianity, as printing allowed the ideas of Martin Luther and other reformers to spread faster and farther than would have been possible through oral and manuscript transmission alone.

By the eleventh century, the Chan sect began to influence Buddhist education in China. The primary purpose of Chan education was to enable the practitioner to achieve an awakening through individual effort, using techniques such as meditation.^[150] Chan followers paid less attention to doctri­nal study of the sutras and more to the practices and texts that would help them become enlightened. This led to the development of particular genres of texts: “recorded sayings,” “lamp records,” and “pure rules” (monastic codes). Both “recorded sayings” and “lamp records” were textual means to convey the teachings and enlightenment experiences of Chan masters to their disciples over generations. Monastic codes were designed to provide clear guidelines for community life that would also support monks in their quest for enlightenment.

The ideals of Chan education in Song China were transmitted to Korea and Japan, where they became the foundation of Son and Zen monastic education. In Kamakura Japan, Zen monasteries became both repositories of learning akin to the monasteries of medieval Europe and arms of the government. During the Ashikaga period, Buddhist monasteries continued as the primary site of scholarly endeavors and transmission of both Buddhist and Confucian ideas.

Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia between 500 and 1500 presents a dizzying array of different cultures, peoples, and states, but all were influenced by Buddhism, and educational institutions were primarily Buddhist. The transmission of Theravada Buddhism to the kingdom of Pagan (c. 950-1300) marked the beginning of monastic education there. Monastic libraries preserved manu­script collections, and the copying of manuscripts was a monastic responsi­bility. In addition to the education of monks and nuns, lay believers received instruction during obligatory short-term stays in monasteries.^{[151] [152]} Burmese was the language of instruction, but both Sanskrit and Pali were taught for reading Buddhist texts. Indian monks from Nalanda introduced both Mahayana Buddhism and Sanskrit manuscripts on medicine, astrology, and alchemy.

As in Pagan, in the Khmer Empire (c. 800-c. 1440) Buddhist monasteries monopolized education, despite the prominence of Hinduism along with Buddhism. Monks frequently traveled in their studies. In the thirteenth century, and then in greater numbers from the mid-fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, Tai, Burmese, Mon, and Khmer monks studied at mon­asteries across Southeast Asia and in Sri Lanka, spreading Buddhist teachings to new audiences throughout the region. 11 Chiang Mai, the ancient capital of the northern Tai kingdom of Lan Na, was the center of Buddhist education in the region by the fifteenth century.^[153] Chiang Mai's temple Wat Suan Dok was home to a major secondary school and monastic university built in 1371. Founded in 1454, Wat Phra Singh housed a Buddha image that drew pilgrims from throughout Southeast Asia, and after the building of its monastic library in 1488, it was a center for manuscript preservation and copying.

In both South and Southeast Asia, Buddhism was a powerful stimulus to the development of educational institutions. Initially dedicated to religious training, Buddhist monastic schools also instructed students in basic literacy and secular learning that served the educational needs of rulers of states and empires. In East Asia, Buddhist monastic institutions supplemented Confu­cian education, which imperial rulers encouraged and supported as training for government officials.

Christianity and the rise of the European university

Like Buddhist monastic institutions in Asia, Christian monasteries nurtured the earliest stages of institutional education in Europe in the era after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. The monastic movement in the Latin West flowered with the founding of Monte Cassino by St Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-544) in 529 and his writing of the Rule of St Benedict, which led to the institutionalization of reading and education in monasteries. Christian monasteries spread throughout the former Roman provinces, and rulers such as Charlemagne (r. 768-814) sought ways to utilize the educational resources of monasteries in the service of the state. In addition to his court school at Aachen, Charlemagne ordered all monasteries and cathedrals to have schools that would provide free basic education for any boy who could demonstrate his academic abilities. Although not all did, this was the origin of cathedral schools. Charlemagne's support of education was part of a general revival of Latin learning that later scholars termed the “Carolingian Renaissance.”

In contrast to the revival of Latin learning in the Carolingian era, the later “Twelfth-Century Renaissance” (c. 1060s-1160s) was precipitated by an influx of new knowledge, partly through Italy and Sicily, but chiefly through the Iberian peninsula. Translations from Arabic and Greek into Latin allowed European scholars to read hitherto unknown works of Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Galen and Ptolemy, while the rediscovery of Emperor Justinian's Digest paved the way for the renewal of Roman jurisprudence. These new bodies of knowledge profoundly altered the educational landscape of medieval Europe and set the stage for the rise of universities.^[154]

Map 5.i. Universities in Europe

Changes in the European economy and society were equally important to the development of universities (see Map 5.1). A more commercialized economy and larger urban concentrations of population provided greater numbers of students. The medieval university originated in associations of students, or of students and teachers, which were first granted special rights and privileges by both civil and ecclesiastical authorities in the thirteenth century. Only in 1215 was the term universitas used for the first time to describe an assembly of teachers and scholars gathered to hear or to read new work. Universities increased educational opportunities for those seeking professional employment in the ecclesiastical or government realms, or as lawyers or physicians.

By the early thirteenth century, there were three major universities in Europe: Bologna, known for the study of both civil and canon (church) law; Paris, where logic, philosophy, and speculative theology reigned; and Oxford, which became a leader in mathematics and the natural sciences. Other universities were gradually established elsewhere in Europe, while in the Byzantine world, a tradition of higher secular and religious education under the aegis of the Eastern Orthodox Church and state in Constantinople fell prey to political turmoil and fragmentation in the thirteenth and four­teenth centuries.^{[155] [156]}

The student bodies at Bologna and Paris were international, organized into “nations” based on their differing origins (for example, English in Paris, German in Bologna).1⁵ In Italy, most students were laymen, while in north­western Europe almost all were nominally clerics, although not ordained priests. Prospective university students would have to demonstrate a substantial command of Latin. If they had not learned Latin through a cathedral school and their families were prosperous enough, young men could be educated at home with a tutor. Students matriculated through interviews with prospective masters. For the best students, an advanced degree in theology or canon law was the gateway to the upper levels of the church in northern Europe. A degree in civil law or medicine was also a means of advancement. Because women could not become clerics under Church law, it was consequently impossible for them to become university students, but some women did become highly educated as nuns or as daughters of wealthy families with access to tutors.

Clerical status placed university students under the legal authority of the church, but there were economic advantages to clerical status: as clerics, students qualified for benefices (clerical positions that received revenues from endowments). Clashes sometimes erupted between students, who were legally protected by their status as clerics, and civil authorities.

The relationship between the church and universities was also problematic at times. In 1231, for example, a papal bull supported the right of universities to form their own corporate statutes and to strike, which weakened church authorities such as bishops and chancellors. Chancellors were the ex-officio directors of teaching in cathedral schools, and they originally had the privil­ege of conferring the licentia docendi (license to teach), which was the first form of university degree. The backing of the pope strengthened the position of the university faculty over the chancellor with regard to the conferral of degrees, which they did after putting candidates through a grueling

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examination.

Universities provided a structure for faculties to govern their own affairs through elected academic officials. There were initially no university build­ings, so classes were held in rented rooms, and larger gatherings could be held in church buildings. Students who were members of religious orders sometimes lived in special houses established by their order; the earliest of these were set up in the 1220s for the use of students in the Franciscan or Dominican orders. Students not in monastic orders initially lodged in rented rooms or hostels. Residential colleges where lay students lived together and studied under a master began to be established, supported by pious founda­tions through endowments of land, properties, or rents. The first university college was the Sorbonne, founded in 1257, and others followed shortly at Oxford and later elsewhere.^{[157] [158]}

The university curriculum consisted of the seven artes liberales: the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectical reasoning) and quadrivium (music, astronomy, geometry, and arithmetic), followed by one of three advanced subjects (medicine, law, theology). The final examination was given in a student's fourth year, on the threshold of being promoted to baccalaureus (“garlanded with laurels”). Masters taught either by lecturing or by means of oral disputation, in which students played an active role in debate. Peter Abelard's Sic et Non was the basis for the dialectic method of teaching and the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas provided a template for the question-response pedagogy. These became the foundation of Scholasticism, a rigorous method of learning based on dialectical reasoning as developed by Aristotle (thesis - antithesis - synthesis). Reason was the means by which human beings expressed their faith in the rational order of God's creation and their confi­dence that it was accessible to human understanding. Scholasticism expanded beyond theology into many other fields, inspiring the application of its method to all knowledge, not just to proving the Christian faith.

The Yeshiva and education in Judaism

In Judaism study was an act of devotion, and the primary purpose of education was the religious and ethical training of the individual as part of the Jewish community. In theory all Jews were supposed to study the Torah - that is, the Pentateuch or the Five Books of Moses - and at higher levels of education, men were trained in the Talmud, the record of rabbinic discus­sions of law, ethics, customs, and history. Those who mastered this training became rabbis, or teachers, who held high status in their communities both as repositories of knowledge and as transmitters of learning to others.

Between the Arab conquests in the seventh century, when most Jewish communities lived within the framework of the Islamic realm, and the mid­eleventh century, Jews experienced a religious and cultural renaissance often referred to as the “Gaonic period” (589-1038). The Gaon was the spiritual and academic head of the yeshiva, or academy, where scholars gathered to expound and discuss the Torah and the Talmud and to issue authoritative rulings (responsa) concerning Jewish law.^[159] The Babylonian (in Sura and Pumbeditha along the Euphrates River, later in Baghdad) and the Palestinian (in Jerusalem, then Tyre) yeshivas were the centers of Jewish intellectual and religious life in this period. The geographical division corresponded to the production of two pre-Islamic collections of rabbinic discussions on Jewish religion and law, the Babylonian Talmud and the Palestinian Talmud, which then became the main object of study in Jewish schools. The Gaon had the power to levy taxes to support the yeshiva, to appoint communal officers, and to respond to both theological and secular questions submitted to the academy from throughout the Jewish diaspora.^[160] The exchange of questions and responses with the Gaon were a kind of “correspondence education” in which the Gaon served as an authoritative source of knowledge about Jewish tradition and learning for Jews scattered across Afro-Eurasia.

After the Gaonic period, higher learning continued in local yeshivas of various countries. The Jews of northern France, Germany, and England were increasingly subject to persecution by Christian rulers, beginning at the time of the First Crusade (1096). Despite this, Franco-GermanJewry produced a corpus of Talmudic and halakhic (pertaining to the entire body of religious law) commentaries, represented by the genre known as tosafot, which revo­lutionized the study of rabbinic literature. The shift to Talmud commen­tators (Tosafists) in northern yeshivas roughly corresponded to the transition from monastic schools to cathedral schools in the Christian world, from rote learning of religious texts to a logical analytical approach.^[161]

Despite the injunction to all Jews to study the Torah, women were not required to learn Hebrew since they were prohibited from actively partici­pating in public worship. Study of the Torah by women was even proscribed by some medieval rabbis because of the fear that literacy would lead to immorality.^[162] As in other societies, however, there is evidence that at least some Jewish women were either teachers or regarded as highly learned. A woman teacher in twelfth-century Cairo was unwilling to abandon her successful career at her husband's behest,^[163] while the daughter of the Babylonian Gaon in twelfth-century Baghdad taught in her father's famous yeshiva.^[164] A sixteenth-century rabbi commented that “many Jewesses in South Germany were, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, noted for their learning... These women entered into learned discussions with famous rabbis, and the opinions of ‘Lady Rabbinists' were cited often with approval.”^[165]

Mosques and madrasas in the medieval Muslim world

Like their Jewish brethren, Muslims were “People of the Book” for whom the pursuit of learning required of all believers meant the study of sacred texts, coupled with adherence to codes of ethical conduct. Education was essential to religious identity, which transcended ethnic and cultural iden­tities. Oral transmission of religious teachings was as important as the written texts themselves, and both required knowledge of Arabic. As Islam spread with the expansion of the caliphate in the seventh and eighth centuries, training in basic Arabic literacy was needed for many people to adopt the new religion. Instruction was offered in “places of writing” adjacent to mosques, in tents, or even out in the open. The curriculum included memorization and recitation of the Quran, reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with instruction in prayer and other religious duties. Boys were given a basic education by lower-level teachers, and for more advanced learning, the task of the ‘ulama (Muslim clerics) was to instill knowledge of the sacred text and to interpret it as a guide to moral and ethical behavior. Based on their interpretation of collected opinions, specialists in jurisprudence issued deci­sions rendering judgments on legal questions, much as the Jewish Gaons.

The mosque was the primary site of higher education in early Islam, a place of teaching as well as worship. Students gathered in study circles around scholars with specialized knowledge of the Quran and other discip­lines, including hadith (reports of the Prophet's exemplary statements and actions), law, theology, Arabic language and literature, and even non-Islamic sciences (logic, medicine). Students who aspired to become teachers them­selves sought learning from a variety of the leading scholars of the time. Recognition as a teacher was eventually formalized in the written ijaza, which made official a student's authority to transmit books from his teacher. Hostels for students were sometimes attached to mosques and by the tenth century, the fusion of mosque and hostel produced the madrasa (place of study), a new type of formal educational institution. Although the earliest madrasas were probably in Khurasan (Iran), the model madrasa was the Nizamiyya, built in 1065 by the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk in Baghdad. Subsequently, madrasas were constructed throughout the Muslim world.

As in the mosque, the curriculum of the madrasa was based on the Quran and associated disciplines, with a special emphasis on law and its subdisci­plines. Students were required to attend daily classes and Quran recitation sessions, and to devote themselves fully to study. Memorization and recita­tion were essential to train students for disputations, in which they were expected to cite texts verbatim. A madrasa typically specialized in one or more of the four schools of Islamic law, and in addition to legal texts, the curriculum might include Quran exegesis, Arabic language and grammar, philosophy, theology, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and even Sufism (Islamic mysticism).^[166] Teaching positions at madrasas were coveted appoint­ments that awarded both salaries and prestige.

Madrasas were usually not supported by governments, even though high- ranking officials often established them. A madrasa was funded by an endowment (waqf) provided by a patron who would then exercise control over it.^[167] Madrasa patrons were influential people in power, such as viziers or caliphs, and wealthy philanthropists. Endowments might include shops, mills, houses, land, or even entire villages. The proceeds from these endow­ments covered the expenses of the madrasas, including faculty salaries and student stipends. Madrasas often became part of an educational-charitable complex that could include a mosque, a hospital, and even a mausoleum. The Ashrafiyya, constructed and endowed by Sultan al-Ashraf Barsbay around 1425, was a major educational complex in late medieval Cairo. It incorporated halls for each of the four schools of Sunni law, rooms for students, a public fountain, and a primary school, as well as a tomb chamber for the founder's family, and a minaret marking it as a place of public worship. Instructional staff received salaries and students were awarded stipends.^[168] By funding such complexes, urban elites in cities like Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus publicly displayed their support of education and community charity, thus transforming their wealth into status.

Madrasas served religious and secular needs throughout the Islamic world, from North Africa and the Mediterranean to Central and South Asia. They promoted Sunni Islam in Shi‘a-dominated areas or Islamization in newly conquered regions, such as the Delhi sultanate in India. Saladin founded the first madrasa in Cairo in 1170 to restore Sunni teachings, and under his successors and the Mamluks, madrasas flourished in Egypt and other parts of the eastern Mediterranean. Madrasas arrived in Anatolia beginning in the late eleventh century as part of “an Islamic package” that included mosques, khanqahs, hospitals, inns, lodges, and soup kitchens.^[169] The khanqah - similar institutions were also called ribat or zawiyah - was originally a center for Sufis, and it often functioned as both a monastery and a school where Sufi masters instructed followers.

A spectrum of institutions across the Islamic world contributed to the transmission of religious knowledge, from mosque to madrasa to khanqah. The transmission of knowledge could take place in many different insti­tutional settings because learning was an act of piety dependent on the personal authority of a teacher, not an institution. The multitude of insti­tutions facilitated the exposure of ever-larger numbers of people to religious knowledge. Religious knowledge was also transmitted outside the network of endowed schools, by scholars teaching at home, in study circles, and in other settings, both formal and informal. Such venues expanded the possibil­ities for women, in particular, to gain access to instruction.

Although elite women endowed madrasas and other institutions, and even played roles in their administration, they could neither attend them as students nor teach in them. But some women could and did become learned teachers of hadith by studying with scholars, especially family members, in their homes or studying alongside men in private teaching circles in mosques.^[170] Because hadith transmission required only certification of study with an authentic transmitter and the ability to memorize revealed texts, women as well as men were able to do this. In the fourteenth century, a woman from Damascus known as ‘Aisha studied hadith with many teachers and received ijazas from scholars in Aleppo, Hama, Nablus, and Hebron. As her fame spread, many flocked to study with her.

The permeability of institutional boundaries, as well as the importance of the rihla (a knowledge-seeking journey) for Muslim scholars,^[171] is illustrated by the career of the historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406). A Maghribi by birth, Ibn Khaldun studied in Fez and Granada before his appointment in 1387 to teach at Cairo's newly built al-Zahiriyya madrasa. Upon his return from pilgrimage to Mecca, he was appointed teacher of hadith at another madrasa, and at the same time he was placed at the head of the khanqah of Baybars, the most important Sufi convent in Egypt. The blurring of distinctions among different kinds of institutions that provided education - mosque, madrasa, khanqah - is testimony to the primacy of the teacher-student relationship in Islam over any particular institutional setting and to the relative absence of state control of education. Muslims of all backgrounds had access to learning in a wide range of different settings, from informal study circles to mosques and madrasas. Status was associated with the reputation and authority of individual teachers to transmit learning, embodied in the granting of ijaza to their students, not on access to know­ledge through educational institutions. Consequently, Islamic education before 1500 was characterized by an informal system of instruction based on personal relationships between teachers and students, unlike the formal institutionalization of instruction and examination that evolved in the European universities.

Islam and educational institutions in Africa

Pre-Islamic African traditions were transmitted orally. In many places profes­sional narrators recounted traditions and history that they had learned, thus preserving the collective memory of the society. In some places they used this knowledge to remonstrate with the ruler on behalf of the entire popula­tion. In West Africa such individuals were called griots, and they are men­tioned in the accounts of Muslim observers such as al-Bakri, who noted the presence of one at the court of the king of Ghana in 1068. The Berber traveler Ibn Battuta provided the first eyewitness description of griots at the court of Mali in the mid-fourteenth century.^[172]

By the twelfth century, Islam had spread from North to West Africa, and from the Arabian peninsula to East Africa. Overland trading routes across the Sahara carried Islam to Ghana and Mali, while maritime routes brought Muslim merchants to East African coastal towns such as Kilwa, Malindi, and Mombasa. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Arab clans from Yemen migrated to Mogadishu and contributed to that city’s fame as an important center of Islamic learning.^[173] Part of northeastern Africa remained impervious to the advent of Islam on the African continent until the fourteenth century, and Ethiopia until today. Christian rulers of the kingdoms of Nubia supported Christian monastic institutions as the primary centers of scholarship and the transmission of learning until Nubia was conquered by the Mamluks. After 1400, Nubians converted to Islam and so became part of the African Islamic world and its traditions of learning.

Quranic learning became a fixture at the courts of Kanem-Bornu, a succession of states stretching from the Niger River through modern Chad to the deserts of Libya from the eighth through the nineteenth centuries. In the oasis towns and nomadic encampments of the southwestern Sahara, by the eleventh century higher education was provided by an institution known as the mahadra, and Sufi lodges were also centers of Muslim learning.^[174] By 1500 rural Quranic school settlements dotted the Kanem-Bornu landscape, where families of teachers and scholars congregated with large numbers of students of different ages who served them and helped in the household and fields. These camps of scholars and students shared the itinerant ways of life of nomadic and semi-nomadic groups, and they became common in the western Sahara among the Tuareg (Berber nomadic pastoralists).^[175]

In the region of Ghana (c. 600-1250) and Mali (1200-1450) in West Africa, one of the earliest centers of Islamic learning was the oasis city of Walata.^[176] After 1200, following a shift in trade routes from west to east and the consequent decline of Walata, the gold and salt emporium of Jenne at the southern end of the Niger Inland Delta became an important center of learning.^[177] Trade made cities flourish, and learned men with expertise in writing and law were drawn to these cities where their skills were needed. They were also active as religious teachers and medical practitioners, educat­ing the people in Islam, but also in medicine, history, and astronomy. Muslim rulers promoted the teaching of Islam by patronizing mosques, schools, and libraries. The famed Mali ruler Mansa Musa (r. 1312-37) erected mosques and madrasas in Timbuktu and Gao after his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324.

Strategically located at the meeting point between the fertile Niger Delta and the Sahara, Timbuktu prospered in the fifteenth century, eclipsing Jenne as the center of Islamic learning in the middle Niger region.^[178] With numer­ous schools and private libraries, Timbuktu was known throughout the Muslim world as a center of scholarship in all aspects of Islamic learning. Timbuktu's Sankore mosque provided both a forum for interaction among

scholars and courses of study open to all who could qualify.^[179] But the absence in Timbuktu of the institution of waqf that could support public libraries meant that the Timbuktu ‘ulama, who came from the city's wealthy families, maintained private libraries as a mark of their scholarly standing rather than endowing public libraries.^[180] Unlike the rest of the Muslim world, where aspiring scholars had access to books and instruction irrespective of their social standing, the ‘ulama of Timbuktu were a hereditary elite with control over education.

The Americas

Like written accounts of pre-Islamic Africa by Islamic traders and travelers, the pre-Columbian Americas are chronicled primarily through the writings of outsiders, Spanish priests whose observations of the Maya, Aztecs, and Incas were recorded in the sixteenth century. The Spanish chroniclers testify to the importance of oral tradition and skill in oratory among Mesoamerican peoples. But both the Maya and the Aztecs also left written records in their own script, which can be used along with archaeological evidence to recon­struct Aztec and Maya societies. Although the Maya city-states were con­stantly warring with each other, training as a warrior was not regarded as highly as education for the priesthood or for administrative duties that fell to the nobility. Maya nobles (males) were instructed in reading and writing hieroglyphs, which provided them with esoteric knowledge that separated them from commoners.

Educational institutions are better documented in Aztec society than elsewhere in Mesoamerica. Between the ages of 12 and 15, Aztec children attended the cuicacalli (“House of Song”), the school of the territorial kinship group (calpulli) to which they belonged. Some sources suggest that all children attended, and some that only elite boys did. Here they were instructed in the songs and orations that prepared them to take part in major religious ceremonies of the Aztec calendar. Learning these sacred songs and stories also taught them about Aztec cosmology and the place of the Aztec people in it.^[181]

Education between the ages of 15 and 20 was stratified according to social status. Sons of commoners and lower-ranking nobles went on for further study of history, religion, and music in the telpochcalli (“House of Youth”), located in each of Tenochtitlan's city wards.^[182] Because warfare was a primary focus of Aztec society, students in the telpochcalli received intensive military training, which included accompanying the army on campaigns as burden­bearers in order to gain experience of battle. Boys slept at the telpochcalli at night, but ate meals with their families and continued to spend part of the day acquiring the skills to pursue a vocation from their fathers. Sons of the higher-ranking nobility attended one of six or more calmecacs (“row of houses”), which were attached to the temples of Tenochtitlan and therefore under the direct control of priests (see Figure 5.2).^[183] They lived at the school, which was more like a monastery because of its temple affiliation and supervision by religious authorities. The calmecac provided military training, along with more diversified and advanced instruction than that of the telpochcalli in religion, astrology, the calendar, writing and oral speech, history, art, song and dance, law, mathematics, government, and architec­ture. These students were being trained to become priests, scribes, govern­ment officials, military leaders, or judges. Students at the calmecac spent much of their time memorizing historical and religious material, for they had the responsibility as members of the elite to preserve and transmit Aztec cultural heritage. The patron god of the calmecac was Quetzalcoatl, the creator deity who was also “the god of learning and culture, of ancient lore, the god of civilization itself.”^[184] The patron god of the telpochcalli was Tezca- tlipoca, the war god. Although schooling ended for girls with the cuicacalli, daughters of the nobility had the opportunity to receive further education in temple schools.^[185]

In Incan society most children did not receive schooling. There was an institution of higher learning at the Inca capital, Cuzco, for the sons of the nobility. During the reign of the Inca Pachacutec (c. 1400-48), the heirs of provincial chiefs were required to reside in Cuzco for education. In the first year, they were instructed in Quechua; in the second, they studied theology

Figure 5.2 Elite boys enter a calmecac for instruction, from the Florentine Codex by Bernardino de Sahagun, c. 1540-85 (Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Florence, Italy / Bridgeman Images)

and ritual; in the third, they learned the interpretation of khipu, the knotted strings that were used as a means of record-keeping; and in the fourth year, they learned more about khipu and history. The goal of this education was to produce citizens who could serve the state. Attractive young women were chosen to be educated in vast, convent-like places near the Temple of the Sun, and in provincial centers scattered throughout the empire. Here they were taught domestic skills of weaving, spinning, and cooking. They were required to remain virgins, and at marriageable age, four or five of those from the school in the capital were selected as permanent brides of the Sun; others were wed to the Inca or to provincial chiefs.^[186]

Among Mayas, Aztecs, and Incas formal educational institutions were directly tied to state needs, especially the training of warriors and priests. Because the state itself was sanctioned by religion, priests played a crucial role in maintaining the state, as warriors did in expanding and defending it. As in other parts of the world, schooling was sharply divided by gender and status, in both practical skills and religious instruction.

Conclusions and comparisons

For the vast majority of the world's population during most of this period, knowledge that transcended the practical concerns of daily life was religious in nature. Religion also provided the setting for education: Buddhist monas­teries in Asia, Christian monasteries in Europe, and mosques in the Islamic world. Learning was not an end in itself, but a path to religious knowledge. However, as Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam were fused to expanding states and empires, monasteries and mosques also provided basic education that served the administrative and legal needs of rulers.

Before 1000, in contrast to educational institutions grounded in the spread of these world religions, Confucianism inspired an educational institution that directly served the Chinese state: the civil service examination system. Humanistic ideals of learning derived from Confucian texts were woven together with the practical needs of the state to administer a vast bureau­cracy. The influence of Confucianism and the examination system extended throughout East Asia, and Confucian schools coexisted with Buddhist monas­tic institutions in this region of the world.

In both Judaism and Islam, formal institutions of religious education evolved alongside synagogues and mosques: the yeshiva in Judaism and the madrasa in Islam. Islam was the defining religion of states and empires, followed by rulers and subjects alike, but the diasporic conditions of Jewish life meant that individual Jews and their communities resided within states and empires governed by followers of other religions. And yet, Islam was not subject to centralized religious leadership, while through the end of the Gaonic period in the early eleventh century, Judaism was. Both Judaism and Islam relied on the authority of rabbis and ‘ulama to determine correct interpretations of sacred texts. Consequently, for both Jews and Muslims, the relationship between teacher and student was paramount. Religious texts were the core of the curriculum, but oral teachings - incorporating the interpretations of a teacher - were also of great importance in the transmission of learning. For Muslims especially, personal authority over a text was the means by which instructors bestowed licenses to teach. Thus, although madrasas and yeshivas thrived as places of instruction, education was less tied to specific institutional settings than to particular teachers. Education for both Jews and Muslims was also mobile, as the trope of the “wandering scholar” in Judaism has its counterpart in the custom of the rihla for Muslims.

There was tension between the dual functions of education in Buddhist and Christian institutions that provided training to serve the secular needs of rulers as well as instruction for religious purposes. Tension was likewise inherent in Confucian education for the examination system, which juxta­posed instruction in humanistic ideals with the needs of the state to recruit administrators. Tension of this nature was largely absent in Islamic educa­tional institutions because the state was closely aligned with Islam and thus knowledge for state service was not clearly distinct from religious know­ledge. Similarly, formal educational institutions in pre- and post-Islamic sub­Saharan Africa and in the Americas were directly tied to state religion and therefore did not generate the kinds of tensions between religious and secular education observed elsewhere. Such tension lay at the very heart of the European university, in which the search for knowledge was embedded in struggles between ruler and pope and in the changing needs of an increas­ingly urban and commercial economy. It is, however, precisely in the European university that knowledge burst out of its religious confines as a pursuit independent of Christianity. The university in medieval Europe traced its origins to monasteries and cathedral schools, but its antecedents also lay in Greek and Roman thought, enriched by Arab and Byzantine scholarship. Ultimately, this combination of influences created the conditions under which knowledge was no longer defined as religion, although the use of reason as a method of analysis began as a path to faith.

What might be called the “fetish of institutionalization" - the tendency to neglect informal arrangements in favor of more formal structures, or to view them as somehow less “institutional” - can distort the portrayal of diverse historical conditions. The term “institution” can be used in a way that either imposes a fixed quality on fluid and shifting practices or ignores such practices as not “institutions.” This problem is most acute in viewing regions beyond Afro-Eurasia not dominated by the world religions, where the historical record of formal educational institutions is sparse. However, in sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas, the transmission of learning was more often woven into the fabric of daily life rather than segregated as a set of formally recognized institutions. Where such institutions did exist - the West African griot or the Aztec calmecac - their functions were closely aligned with a social and political order produced by the fusion of state and religion.

In contrast, the relationship between state and religion varied greatly across Afro-Eurasia, ranging from Confucian China, where religion was subordinate to and controlled by the state, to the struggle between Church and state in Europe, and finally the Islamic world, where the state repre­sented but did not control religion. Consequently, the functions of educa­tional institutions in Afro-Eurasia correlated with the degree to which state and religion were integrated. Scholar official elites in China and other parts of East Asia influenced by Confucianism achieved social and political status through the state civil service examination system by demonstrating their access to knowledge. Muslim clerics and Jewish rabbis commanded status through their knowledge of religious texts and law, unmediated by the state. European scholars successfully negotiated their independence from Church and state to establish universities that served both and yet began to define knowledge as distinct from either.

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