Unlikely as it may seem to the whining schoolboy creeping unwillingly to school, this word is ultimately from a word meaning "leisure".
This was the Greek word skhole, but since the Greeks were highly cultured people, their idea of leisure was hanging out with Socrates and Plato discussing philosophy so skhole came to mean "employment of one’s leisure time in disputation and discussion."
It later came to apply to more formalized discussion in the ancient Greek equivalent of a school . The Romans borrowed it from the Greeks, and almost all European languages borrowed it from Latin.
ln English, it would have been pronounced SKOLE until Shakespeare's time (the double o represents a long o in Middle English). There was no h in the word in English until the Renaissance, -when people wanting to show off their knowledge of Greek and Latin reinserted it.
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