Our name

Worldschool.University.

Our name joins two ideas: learning from the world and learning as a community.

worldschool

Learning from the world as it is and seeing how its parts connect.

The world is one learning environment

Worldschooling treats the world as a source of learning. People, places, nature, culture, and everyday life can all shape what someone learns.

Travel can widen the view, but the idea is wider than travel. Worldschooling begins wherever a real question leads someone to look closer.

For WorldSchool University, worldschool means learning from the world as it is and seeing how its parts connect.

university

A community, and a word that points toward the whole.

A community before it was a campus

The English word university came through French from the Latin universitas.¹ That Latin word could mean a whole or aggregate, and later a corporation or society.¹ In academic use, it was short for universitas magistrorum et scholarium, a community of masters and scholars.¹

Universitas came from universus, which meant whole, entire, or all together.¹ Universe came from the same word family.¹² Universus combines unus, one, with versus, turned, a form of vertere.² This is the source of the poetic reading "turned into one."²

The word path

unusone

versusturned, from vertere

universuswhole, all together

universitasa whole, a corporation, a community

universitya community of learners

This path explains the word history. Our wider meaning is a deliberate interpretation.

The historical meaning gives us a community. The older root gives us an image of parts brought into relation. We use both ideas in our name.

Structure was part of the community

Medieval universities had courses, faculties, examinations, and degrees.³ The community did not replace that structure.³ It was the body that taught, examined, and granted membership.³

What we mean by university

For WorldSchool University, university means a community where knowledge can connect. Letters, stories, numbers, nature, and history belong in the same conversation when a question calls for them.

Put together

WorldSchool University

A memetic repository for the most fundamental memes of the universe.

Here, meme means an idea, symbol, or practice that people can learn and pass on. A repository keeps these memes available so people can use them and build on them.

We start with numbers and letters. They support counting, reading, writing, and measurement. The repository shows how later concepts grow from these foundations and connect with each other.

WorldschoolLearning from the world as it is and seeing how its parts connect.

UniversityLearning together and connecting what we learn.

Sources

Origin and history of universityOnline Etymology Dictionary
Origin and history of universeOnline Etymology Dictionary
The Medieval UniversityUniversity of Cambridge
The Medieval Problem of UniversalsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy