The latest public relations ploy among critics of the public school system is to refer to public schools as “government schools.” This is a very canny move among those who would dismantle the public schools, since while on the face of it the term is accurate (public schools are run by the government), it subtly flips the more positive term “public” to the much more negative “government.” “Government schools” makes me think of “government cheese,” not exactly a term Kraft will be using in its next multimillion-dollar ad campaign. Examples of this usage are all over the web.
The corollary term is also used in the above example – “free market schools” instead of “private schools.”
Words mean things.