School (meaning)

There are two different nouns school in English, and several shades of meaning in the two verbs more or less correlated to them. (You may want to see the page on the spelling of 'school', which applies to all these meanings.)

• The noun best known to all users of AWE is likely to be that of an educational institution. In the UK, this is mostly provided for learners under the age of compulsory education, currently (2013) 16.
  • It is a paradox that may not be appreciated by many under the age of 16, and undergoing education in schools that the root of school is the Greek σχολὴ, which OED translates primarily as 'leisure' (amongst others).
  • σχολὴ is also given as 'employment of leisure', and thus, among the ancient Greeks (a deeply serious people) 'learned discussion', 'disputation', 'lecture', and then a 'group to whom lectures were given'.
    • School is also used to mean more generally 'a group', 'a band', 'a company'. This is now commonly used in academic and artistic circles for a group of like-minded people, such as followers of a particular philosopher or doctrine ('the school of Plato', 'the utilitarian school'; followers of a particular historian, technique or approach ('the Namier school', 'the documentary school'); followers of the artistic tradition of a recognized master or place or time ('the school of Durer', 'the Florentine school', 'the twelfth century school of Siena'); and, by extension, almost any field of human endeavour. The phrase Old School is used of traditionalists in any discipline, mostly be members of a corresponding New School.
      • This modifies into 'a place where something is learnt', not always formally, as in 'the streets are the school of crime' and sometimes remarkably informally, as in 'the school of hard knocks', a phrase used by people who have succeeded in life without benefit of 'book learning' to impress the listener with their struggles and difficult circumstances, and sometimes to sneer at the impractical academics in their ivory towers.