The word meant protection from enemies. It had nothing to do with money or schools.
Tuition entered English in the early fifteenth century as tuicioun, meaning protection from enemies, care, custody, and safekeeping.1 It came through Anglo-French tuycioun from Old French tuicion, which meant guardianship.
The root is the Latin verb tueri, to look at, to watch over, to guard. From tueri came tuitio, a noun meaning the act of watching, caring for, or protecting. The same root produced tutor, originally a legal guardian of a child, and intuition, literally a looking inward.2
The meaning shifted in the 1580s, when tuition began to describe the action of teaching pupils, built on the idea that a tutor was a kind of guardian.1 For nearly two and a half centuries, tuition meant instruction. A student received tuition from a teacher.
The financial meaning, a fee paid for being taught, did not appear until 1828, likely as a shortening of the phrase tuition fees.1 In that original phrase, tuition still referred to the act of teaching, and fees referred to the cost.
The collapse of the phrase into a single word changed what the word communicated. When tuition meant instruction, the word pointed toward a relationship between teacher and student. When tuition came to mean the price of instruction, the word pointed toward a transaction.3
British English still uses tuition primarily to mean teaching. A British student receives tuition. An American student pays tuition. The two usages coexist in the same word, but they describe different relationships to education.
In Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, written around 1598, Claudio says he commits a friend to the tuition of God, using the word in its original sense of protective care.4 Four centuries later, the same word appears on invoices.