Author: KNIPE (Rest):
Title: A Course of Lectures: Containing Remarks upon the Government and Education of Children. Thoughts upon the Government and Education of Children, Thoughts upon the present Plan of Education, and An Essay upon Elocution. As read lately in many parts of England and Scotland. To which is added, A Sermon.
Description: Edinburgh: Printed for the Author, 1783. 8vo, 202 x 128 mms., pp. 338, including half-title, contemporary calf, recently rebacked with old gilt spine and red morocco label laid down, facsimiles of pp. 19 - 22 inserted before defective leaves of those pages in text, and last leaf of subscribers in facsimile; text a little fingered and soiled, but a good copy. Who was Rest Knipe? He must have been known to dozens of people in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, because there are 32 pages of subscribers in the two editions of this book; but he seems to have escaped the attention of scholars. Perhaps the most obvious feature of his treatise is the almost completely secular character of the education he prescribes for children and his opposition to a classical education for most boys: "after a boy has been puzzling his poor brains, and been tortured with Latin for several years, it is ten to one, that, comparative speaking, he knows nothing; i. e nothing radical and to the bottom; nothing, in short, but what one year's apprenticeship will entirely efface." Walter Scott, presumably the father of the novelist and poet, was one of the subscribers. ESTC T121650 locates copies in BL, Cambridge, NLS; Harvard, McMaster, National Institute of Education, and Pennsylvania. The Aberdeen printing is a different setting, with pagination [6], 11-304, and probably takes precedence over the Edinburgh edition.

Keywords: Education children prose Scottish Enlightenment


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