This is not a direct answer to your question, but I would like to address one thing:

My hypothesis is that a curriculum from 1000ad might be equivalent to a 3rd grade education nawadays or something rediculuous like that.

This statement is an example of [presentism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis)) and it is something that modern historians try to avoid as far as possible. You are assuming that just because the sum total of knowledge in Western Europe in the 11th century was less than the sum total of knowledge today, this implies that students somehow studied less back then than they do today. This is a false assumption.

To understand why university syllabuses back then were designed the way that they were, you first have to start by asking: What was the function of a university education? What were the prerequisites for going to university? What was a university graduate expected to do once he graduated? What training did the professors teaching at universities have? The answer to each of these questions will lead you to understand that university educations in the past were not at all equivalent to university (or even school) educations today. Their function was very different, and that is why the students who went to university did not learn the same things at all.

Secondly, don't assume that because people back then knew less, that they were somehow less smart than people today. The fact is that school syllabus today is the result of all those centuries of research and pedagogy that have preceded us. For us to be able to have that knowledge, someone had to discover, invent or create the systems of knowledge we're familiar with today. For example, middle school kids learn algebra these days, but that doesn't mean that it is something really simple that always existed. Someone had to invent algebra, formalize the rules, and create all the notation systems we're familiar with today. If that work hadn't been done in the 11th century, that doesn't mean that university students then were too stupid to learn it.

To put this into perspective, try to think about how it might be in the future. Imagine it's the year 3014, and humans have discovered how to travel faster than light. Turns out there is a way to create a rift in the space-time continuum and all you need to do is step inside it and you can travel faster than light to your destination. This knowledge is so commonplace that even third graders know about it.

Someone might then look back at the year 2014 and go "Wow, did those people seriously think faster-than-light travel was not possible? What idiots! Even 3rd graders know that all you have to do is create a rift in the space-time continuum!"

See what is wrong here? It's not that we're too stupid to understand something that 31st century kids can handle. It's just that we don't know how it might be possible. Our scientists haven't yet been able to find out that FTL travel is possible. There is a lot of scientific work that remains to be done before we understand how FTL travel is possible, and unless we do it, we cannot possibly know how to do it.

So when you judge the difficulty of a university syllabus, you must compare it against the standards of its time, not against modern standards. And in an age where barely anybody could read, when books were terribly expensive, when all learning was done in Latin, when the scientific method was not widely followed, and when we just didn't know as much about stuff as we do today, it's no wonder that you had to be old, of a certain intelligence, and reasonably well-off to go to university.

Historian of higher education checking in.

Higher education in Medieval Europe is a moving target, changing rapidly as education institutions form and re-form, new texts are introduced (e.g. Aristotle), and medieval philosophy develops.

In general, however, it was organized around the Seven Liberal Arts: the Trivium of Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, and the Quadrivium of Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, And Astronomy. Other commenters have already explained more about these. Each school had its own unique formula for how they emphasized, organized, and taught the arts.

A millennium ago in Western Europe, the seeds of the medieval universities were growing in small cathedral schools. The most influential of these was the school at Chartres. Under Bernard of Chartres, the curriculum was organized around a daily reading (lectio) of a certain text. To quote from a history of the school:

[The teacher] breaks the text into parts of speech, explains the metrics when it is verse, points out barbarisms and other breaches of the rules of language, explains tropes and figures of speech. A [teacher] like Bernard apparently employed the [reading] as an occasion to discourse about all the arts. John tells us that he would assess the arguments of the text (logic), comment on its eloquence and persuasiveness (rhetoric), and, when the text permitted it, expatiate on the quadrivium of mathematics and on physics and ethics.

What did they read at Chartres? A lot of Greek and Latin philosophy and poetry, as well as Christian theology. The reading lists included Church fathers like Augustine, a translation Plato's Timaeus with commentary, a bit of Porphyry, Cicero's Dream of Scipio, and Boethius's works on mathematics, music, and Aristoelian logic.

For further reading on the development of the Western liberal arts tradition, I highly recommend Bruce Kimball's Orators & Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Eduction (College Board, 1995) and James Turner's Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton, 2014).

What distinguishes a "university" from a place of higher learning? I only ask because the last time I was in India I visited a place called "Nalanda", which was an ancient international university started in the 6th century CE. It was still be excavated at the time.

I am by no means an expert but I recently read "Infinitesimal" by Amir Alexander so I will answer to the best of my ability from that. In this book he discusses the curriculum of universities run by the Jesuits which was most universities in the 16th to 18th centuries. The majority of the curriculum was centered on theology, physiology, and mathematics.

Theology was taught as the highest of the subjects as the Jesuits are a Catholic group.

Aristotleian physiology was taught but was very different from any physics or biology that we study today since science as we know it did not truly begin until the mid to late 1600's.

In mathematics (the focus of the aforementioned book), Euclidean geometry was about the only thing taught. This involved starting from first principals of geometry and expanding step by step through proofs whose truth was self evident through previous proofs or principals. Algebra was just coming in to the mathematical scene and very early forms of calculus were being explored but were forbidden to be taught in Jesuit universities

The comparison to modern third-graders is entirely inappropriate. A center of higher education 1000 years ago would teach a way of thinking that was disciplined, structured, and hierarchical. Most college students today aren't capable of prolonged concentration in following an argument closely and interpreting every word and every shade of meaning, let alone elementary school students.

The purpose of the University education was not to foster creative thought or innovation. The students were expected to read the curriculum, and to explicate the meaning expressed by the original author. They would read closely, word by word, line by line, often reading the same material several times. They were expected to follow a logical arguement, to determine the flow of ideas in the work, identify the rhetorical devices or formal syllogisms used.

In Mathematics, the students would follow the proofs presented, writing the equation and perfroming the operations in the sequence of the text. You would fill page after page with written equations, testing every statement in the text. For example if the text stated, "the inverse is also true," the student would reverse the terms, and follow the equation through to prove that the principle was true.

The outcome of reading the texts this closely, following the arguments, interpreting every qualifying phrase, was close to memorizing the material. The student would internalize the work and thought processes, becoming an educated and disciplined thinker.

My hypothesis is that a curriculum from 1000ad might be equivalent to a 3rd grade education nawadays or something rediculuous like that.

Have you read any philosopher from 1000 years ago? Or before that? Try, for example, to digest Phaedo by Plato. Does that sound like 3rd grade stuff?

Am I incorrect in assuming that a good portion of studies in western Europe would have been biblical? What was the role of the church in the early history of these institutions?