I was being snarky in response to a pedantic response that was itself founded on conveniently ignoring that the article was written in a US publication using American English. As such, if they were called school students in American English, and someone chose to ignore that and complain about how it was called something else in British English, I might have been tempted to make that same argument in that situation.

The point more that if one person can apply "pedantry" with disregard for convention and context, then so can I.