This essay offers an account of the beginnings of modern schooling. The Latin word "schola" began to mean "school" in the ninth century. But early practices associated with this newly distinct social phenomenon took several centuries to become codified, institutionalized and recognized. Until that happened, school was a label or brand-image used by purveyors of learning. Ideas about unified activity, method, order, discipline and efficiency formed the foundation of institutional codification. Beginning in the Renaissance and strengthened in the Reformation, codification reached a high point in the preparation of Comenius' "Didactica Magna" in the middle of the seventeenth century. And these assumptions about standardization and normalization have continued to nourish the appeal of modern schooling for at least another 300 years.