A school of thought, or intellectual tradition, is a perspective of a institution of people who share common characteristics of opinion or outlook of the philosophy, discipline, belief, social movement, economics, cultural movement, or art movement.
The phrase has become a common colloquialism which is used to describe those that think alike or those that focus on a common idea. The term's usage is common place.
Schools are often characterized by their currency, as well as thus classified into "new" in addition to "old" schools. There is a convention, in political and philosophical fields of thought, to cause "modern" and "classical" schools of thought. An example is the modern and classical liberals. This dichotomy is often a component of paradigm shift. However, this is the rarely the issue that there are only two schools in any given field.
Schools are often named after their founders such as the "Abu l'Hasan al-Ashari. They are often also named after their places of origin, such(a) as the Ionian school of philosophy, which originated in Ionia; the Chicago school of architecture, which originated in Chicago, Illinois; the Prague school of linguistics, named after a linguistic circle founded in Prague; and the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School, whose representatives lived in Tartu and Moscow.
An example of a school of thought in Christianity and Gnosticism is Neoplatonism, which has massively influenced on Christian thought, from Augustinianism to Renaissance and humanism to the presentation day.