Yes -- but also all "Public" schools were not "Church" schools.
Basically there is a time when education was almost exclusively monastic; those who were not taught privately were taught by religious institutions.
The public schools were free of that influence to a greater extent.
There is one more tier of school you don't mention which sits somewhere below "public": the "commercial school". There were some of these owned by the livery companies, and were a tier of schools that were created along the lines of the public schools but before the school system was fully established. Most of them were not fee-paying but were funded by donations or livery company charitable funds. They taught largely vocational skills (but professional ones rather than technical ones); parents sent their kids to commercial schools to bring back the knowledge to professionalise the family business or to set them up in a trade.
(I went to a school that was originally founded this way, but was a part-state-owned grammar school by the time I got there a century later)
Oh wow, thanks for adding that detail. I didn’t know about practically any of that. That’s a fascinating side of things: I thought there must have been a slight lacuna in my understanding, that not all the educated classes could have employed private tutors, and that definitely fills in a missing link for me.
Though it adds another small question: aren’t/weren’t most public schools severely Anglican? I know my school was quite radical at the time for admitting Jewish boys, so that always painted a picture of a not-exactly-super-secular institution, but maybe I’ve got the wrong impression in some way...
Also, those commercial schools sound a bit - subtracting for a moment the fee-paying aspect - like the German technical education system which I’ve always liked the sound of. I wish we had something more like that today, though obviously now it wouldn’t - or shouldn’t - be fee-paying.
> Though it adds another small question: aren’t/weren’t most public schools severely Anglican?
Yes -- implicitly.
(sidebar: I am not sure that, when public schools really first sprang up, it was even possible to educate people of Jewish descent; the situation for Jews in england in particular was deeply complicated by their unique relationship to the state as established by the Magna Carta. Either way, they were not landowners by law and therefore probably not that interesting to the church.)
But at any rate as Wikipedia says, the first public schools appear to have been generalised and detached versions of grammar schools, which were the schools run for wealthy families that were attached to churches and monasteries.
Those schools started off teaching young people the skills needed to function in church life, but eventually they seem to have become so generalised for various other trades that they separated themselves in an administrative sense.
They'd have had lots of clergy doing the teaching nonetheless, I imagine, simply because really only clergy had access to education at that point.
I am not sure how "technical" the school I went to ever was in its earliest form (we did have technical schools in the UK for a while as a precursor to the comprehensive system).
I get the impression it was commercial in the sense that it taught reading and writing necessary for conducting a business, maths necessary for bookkeeping and engineering, and some science.
(The livery company that founded it still owns half of it -- the outside half, literally)
Basically there is a time when education was almost exclusively monastic; those who were not taught privately were taught by religious institutions.
The public schools were free of that influence to a greater extent.
There is one more tier of school you don't mention which sits somewhere below "public": the "commercial school". There were some of these owned by the livery companies, and were a tier of schools that were created along the lines of the public schools but before the school system was fully established. Most of them were not fee-paying but were funded by donations or livery company charitable funds. They taught largely vocational skills (but professional ones rather than technical ones); parents sent their kids to commercial schools to bring back the knowledge to professionalise the family business or to set them up in a trade.
(I went to a school that was originally founded this way, but was a part-state-owned grammar school by the time I got there a century later)