Although the ancient museums appear much like the best of our universities today, their line to the present is broken. The medieval arts and philosophy faculties in Europe were not exactly corporations for generating new knowledge; indeed, they owe more to secondary-school instruction in antiquity than they do to the academies and museums. In their final form the seven liberal arts (the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmonics or music; and the trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic or logic), which formed the base of medieval university instruction, may be traced to schools of the first century BC. By the imperial Roman period, however, in the schools that retailed these liberal arts, literary studies overwhelmed natural sciences. Like their European successors, Hellenistic and Roman engineers, surveyors, and sailors learned their craft apprentice-style.
The schools of higher learning at Athens, Rome, and elsewhere (or rather, the collection of professors of grammar, rhetoric, law, and medicine at these locations) continued into the sixth century AD, when they were extinguished by Christian fanaticism or barbarian neglect. But the classical tradition nevertheless survived for a thousand years, in Constantinople. Between 425 and 1453, diverse classically inspired schools provided the administrative elite of Byzantium.
The warriors of the Fourth Crusade turned their attention to the conquest of Byzantium. They sacked Constantinople in 1204 and then set about to conquer the outlying provinces. The first Latin emperor of Byzantium, Baldwin I, asked Pope Innocent III to send professors from the University of Paris to found a Latin institute in Constantinople. Innocent agreed to the plan. Also in the thirteenth century, Paris founded a Collegium Constantinopolitanum, designed to lodge and train a score of Byzantine clerics. When Michael Paleologus recaptured Constantinople in 1261, he revived higher learning by appointing George Acropolita (1217–1282, a politician, general, and historian, whom he had freed from prison) to the chair of Aristotelian philosophy. Acropolita also served as ambassador to Rome, effecting a reconciliation of sorts between the eastern and western churches. Twelfth-century Europeans knew about classical learning thanks to hundreds of years of translation from Arabic, but Aristotle entered the fledgling European universities on the tide of Greek learning that issued from Byzantium. It is possible that the notion of European faculties of higher learning – variously guaranteed by church and state – derives from Byzantine precedent.
Learned colleges appeared in other ancient civilizations, such as South Asia. The end of the Vedic period in India, about 500 BC, saw the emergence of a wandering brotherhood of secular teachers, the vadins. They codified their teachings when imaginative literature began to appear in writing, which until then had been used for administration, commerce, and music. The vadins were in some measure South Asian Sophists, and their activity led to the great schools of Jainism and Buddhism. Jainism, founded by Vardhamana Mahavira, and Buddhism, the teachings of the fifth-century BC Gautama Buddha, both questioned the polytheistic divinities and hierarchical social structure of Vedic traditionalists. For both religious teachers, enlightenment resulted from individual study. Jainist asceticism spread by mass education, while Buddhist thought was concentrated in monastic orders.
With the progressive expansion of Buddhism came the revival of Sanskrit – the language of the Vedic commentaries – as a learned lingua franca. The fusion of Buddhism and Vedic traditions around 1200 led to classical Hinduism, with three kinds of educational institution. First (and especially in northern India) were the Gurukula schools, small groups of pupils gathered around a private teacher; astronomy was part of the curriculum. Second were the Hindu temple schools of southern India, inspired by the Buddhist monastic seminaries and supported by land grants; natural sciences seem not to have figured in the syllabus, but because the temple schools had hospitals we may imagine that they incorporated medical instruction. Third were the agrahara centres designed to spread Brahmanic learning. These Hindu schools were pale reflections of the Buddhist colleges that had functioned within grand monasteries since the fifth century. Nalanda (located south of Patna in Bihar, eastern India), one of the most famous of these monasteries, had 10,000 inhabitants at the end of the seventh century; of these as many as 1500 were teachers and about one third were students. It was at Nalanda in the seventh century that the Chinese scholar I-hsing (672–717) copied 400 Sanskrit texts.
Natural sciences in South Asia found their firmest supporters not in schools, but in family-controlled guilds. Astronomical knowledge, for example, was a guild secret. The restricted nature of certain kinds of natural knowledge also coloured science instruction at Chinese colleges. Insofar as we have certain knowledge of them, Chinese institutions of higher learning may be traced to the philosophical schools formed at the time of the Warring States, from 475 BC to 221 BC, when kingdoms large and small contested for supremacy. Teachers were required to train and discipline a civilian bureaucracy, and states naturally competed to recruit teachers who could transform administrative norms into ethical principles. The resulting philosophical free-for-all is known as the time of the Hundred Schools. In terms of the multiplicity of sectarian doctrine, the Hundred Schools seem not unlike the late Hellenic period. A handful of the Hundred Schools survived a period of internecine warfare and continued to have an impact long into a time of imperial rule, indeed, up to the present: the Confucianists, the Legalists, the Mohists, the Taoists, the Logicians and the Naturalists.
The Confucianists, followers of Master Kung, held that virtue could be acquired by learning, although his disciples, from Mencius to Xun Zi, differed about how much education might do for people. Legalists, under Han Feizi, believed in the literal interpretation of legal canons and the inflexible application of jurisprudence, a procedure offered to make law both equitable and independent of executive privileges. Mohists, followers of Mo Zi, proclaimed a religious vision of love and encouraged technological improvements that would defend the weak against the strong. Taoists, tracing their origin to the teachings of Lao Zi, advocated the dissolution of reason in ascetic spirituality; their disengagement from the mechanism of statecraft translated into an antipathy for mechanical contrivance, but their quest for a state of grace led Taoists to experiment with therapeutic regimes for extending and improving life. Logicians, followers of Hui Shih and Kungsun Lung, emphasized a search for generalized concepts transcending the ephemeral particular. The Naturalists elaborated the theories of the two forces (Yin and Yang) and the Five Elements (water, fire, wood, metal, earth), attributed to their master Tsou Yen; in contrast to the other schools, they actively sought to advise heads of state.
As in Hellenistic times with the schools of Athens, the Hundred Schools came together in a secular institution of higher learning, the Academy of the Gate of Chi, located in the capital of the State of Chhi. Founded by King Hsüan about 318 BC, and perhaps inspired by one of its fellows, the naturalist Tsou Yen, the academy assembled scholars of many persuasions and from diverse states. These included Taoists, Mohists, and the great Confucian scholar Mencius. Fellows wore special, flat caps and apparently had no obligations beyond advice-giving; they could aspire to the title of grand prefect.
The Academy of the Gate of Chi – the Chinese counterpart to the Museum of Alexandria – did not survive the imperial unification that ended the Warring States period. The grand victor, Chhin Shih Huang Ti, organized an imperial bureaucracy, brought the defeated aristocracy to heel at his court, expanded public works, maintained a large army, and engineered the great northern wall. As part of his codification of laws and rites, he ordered the destruction by burning of all books except his own archives and treatises on medicine, divination, and agriculture. Along with purging wrong words, the new potentate executed wrong-thinking scholars. Chhin Shih Huang Ti died about 210 BC, barely fifteen years after unifying China; his successor, a usurper son, lasted four years more before the Chhin empire (and its academy) dissolved in social disintegration and revolt.
Liu Pang, an escapee from death row, emerged from the ruins of the Chhin to found the Han empire in 202 BC. His dynasty invented ‘classical’ China. Genuine concern for preserving what the Chhin had condemned (and not entirely eradicated) is found in the establishment of an imperial school (Ta Hsüeh) in 124 BC, with various chairs (occupied by professors, po shih); its aim was to produce functionaries. The Han school produced scholars