Timbuktu and Educational Change

Here’s a very fun Smithsonian article about efforts to preserve the huge number of manuscripts still surfacing near Timbuktu, “where from the 1300s to the late 1500s, students came from as far away as the Arabian Peninsula to learn at the feet of masters of law, literature and the sciences.” Also see Wikipedia.

Lately I’ve been gnawing on a question that haunts me a bit. It stems from an assertion made by Walter Ruegg in Universities in the Middle Ages, Volume 1 in A History of the University in Europe. According to Ruegg “the university is the only European institution to have preserved its fundamental patterns and basic social role and function over the course of the last millennium” (page ii and again in a slightly modified form on page xix).

A millennium is a very long human time span.

I certainly count myself among those who believe that networked learning will transform learning and educational institutions. But it’s useful to take the contrary position and ask why this might not happen. How do we explain an institutional form seemingly impervious at its core to all kinds of environmental disruptions?

Which is one of the things that fascinated me about Timbuktu and Sankore Madrasah (University of Sankore). What happened in the late 1500s that ended nearly three centuries of a flourishing learning community in the Sahara?

According to the Smithsonian article, both the intellectual and the economic lifelines to Timbuktu were destroyed in two separate events. First, Moroccan armies invaded Timbuktu, killed scholars who resisted the invasion, and abducted others to Marrakesh and the royal court. Then, European merchants and ocean trade routes desiccated the North-South trade between Timbuktu and the West African coast.

No scholars and no money. That pretty much does it. A once vibrant religious, educational, and trade center leaves a legacy of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts decaying in the desert dust.

This educational transition we’re in, if indeed it happens, is going to take the best that all of us can give.