Public school

A public school in Britain is in fact a private school. The term, a classic false friend, comes from the times when anyone (the public) could attend these schools providing they could afford the fees. Many were originally single-sex boarding schools.

What most people consider "public" schools, in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa are referred to as state-funded schools, i.e. government-funded schools which provide education free of charge, as opposed to privately run schools, that is, fee-paying schools, often called "independent schools", "private schools", or, as above, public schools.

Clarendon Commission
Following public outcry at the misappropriation of school funds at Eton, the Clarendon Commission, a Royal Commission sitting between 1861 and 1864, looked at the public school system in England, their report leading to the Public Schools Act 1868. Among the issues they studied were "the desirability of fagging" and whether science should be taught to children.

Of the nine schools included in the report, seven were boarding schools: Westminster (founded 1179), Winchester (1382), Eton (1440), Shrewsbury (1552), Rugby School (1567), Harrow (1572) and Charterhouse (1611); as well as two day schools: St Paul's (1509) and Merchant Taylors' (1561).

Five members of the seven-man Commission were Old Etonians.

Orwell
George Orwell's essay "Such, such, were the joys" (c. 1947) gave a pretty negative view of his experience at a public school. In a letter to his publisher, Orwell wrote that he considered the essay "really too libellous to print", adding that it should be printed "when the people most concerned are dead". It was first published in the USA in 1952, two years after Orwell's death, but not published in the UK until 1967.