WASE - FREE SCHOOLS 1678 EARLY EDUCATION REFORMER WORK

Book Description: The Theater in Oxford and Simon Millers, Oxford and London, 1678. Full Calf. Book Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. First Edition. 8vo - 7.5 Inches. Scarce work by this early educational radical, essentially arguing for the expansion of free schools to allow greater access to education for the poor. Bound in contemporary dark brown calf with blindstamped fleurons to the corners. Raised and gildes bands to spine. Gilt spine titles on a red spine label. Rebacked retaining almost all of original backstrip. Minor bumping to corners. Later marbled endpapers. (8), 112 pages. Collated complete. Minor light waterstaining to corner of pages to the front half of the work. Otherwise very tidy. One can't help thinking Mr Wase would be horrified to see his own Tonbridge School (a charitable school when he was its headmaster in the 17th century) now catering principally to the offspring of merchant bankers and Russian oligarchs with fees at £25,000+ a year. His message still has resonance today. We can send images of this book on request. 'Wase's Considerations Concerning Free Schools as Settled in England was finally published in Oxford in 1678. ‘Miserable is the face of any nation’, he declared, ‘where neither schools nor universities be frequented: no law, no safe commerce, a general ignorance and a neglect of duty both to God and man’ (p. 34). He therefore proposed to increase rather than to limit the number of free schools in England and Wales, and concluded that adequate instruction should be provided for petty scholars in every parish in the land. This, he maintained, would be both socially and economically advantageous to the nation. The papers he had collected on the subject were consulted by Anthony Wood. Wase's later publications included another dictionary, two further works on Cicero, Aelfredi magni (1678) a Latin version of John Spelman's life of Alfred and Senarius, sive, De legibus et licentia veterum poetarum (1687), a treatise on Greek and Latin metrics and rhythmics. Altogether his scholarship in the classical languages established him, according to John Loveday, as ‘one of the most eminent Philologers which England could boast of in the last age’ (Allibone, Dict., 3.2595). Wase died in Oxford on 29 August 1690, and was buried in St Mary's, Oxford' - Richard E. Hodges, DNB.

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