David Manson (schoolmaster)

Manson was born in 1726 at Cairncastle, County Antrim, son of John Manson and Agnes Jamison. At the age of eight he contracted rheumatic fever which affected him for the rest of his life. Because of this he was schooled at home by his mother. He began his working life as a servant boy on a farm near Larne. There he attracted the attention of the Larne schoolmaster the Reverend Robert White under whose instruction he improved himself in writing, arithmetic and "the rudiments of the Latin" White encouraged his students to write poetry and to recite or perform their literary work. He also published a collection of poetry which included many written not only by as his male pupils but also by his female charges to whose education he was equally committed. With other Presbyterian ministers of his generation, it is possible that White had studied either at an academy in Dublin or at the University of Glasgow with "the father of the Scottish Enlightenment", Francis Hutcheson. Writing of children, Hutcheson stressed their kindness and sense of fairness and justice and he called for education that avoided rigid learning and harsh punishment. White's Glasgow-trained son, John Campbell White, (later with Dickson, a United Irishman) was himself to be an education reformer, helping establish a Free School for poor children in Belfast. Manson began teaching on the north Antrim coast, holding his first school in a byre or cow house, and serving the Shaws of Ballygally Castle (where for many years an apartment was known as the "David Manson" room) as a family tutor. Inspired by the "mild manner of his mother's instruction" Manson began to develop the principles of his future pedagogy, finding opportunities for children to learn even as he played with them. == Manson's English Grammar "play school" ==

In order to support himself and his wife, Manson started a small home brewery. Mary Ann McCracken recalls her uncle Henry Joy, proprietor of The News Letter, turning to Manson for "a mug of ale and long discussions" not only of politics, but also of education. Recording his life in 1811, William Drennan in his Belfast Monthly Magazine noted that Manson "never allowed the desire of founding a play school, which was to be taught on the principle of amusement" to "depart from his mind". James MacDonnell (polymath and "father of Belfast medicine"), and the siblings Mary Ann, and Henry Joy, McCracken. In 1788, the McCrackens were to attempt a school of their own for the poor, but it was quickly closed down by the town's increasingly unnerved Anglican establishment for its indifference to sabbatarian and sectarian sentiment. Ten years later, having led United Irish forces into the field against the Crown at Antrim, Henry Joy was hanged outside his former schoolroom in the High Street Market House. Such was the success of his school in Clugston's Entry that in 1760 Manson moved it to larger premises (also) in High Street, where he accommodated boarders, and eight years later to a still larger, purpose-built schoolhouse in the new Donegall Street (where today he is commemorated by an Ulster History Circle Blue Plaque). Manson also started a night school, offering free instruction in his methods to any school teacher who would attend. An advertisement for the new Donegall Street school in July 1768, noted that the "boarders are permitted to go out without a guide", and that "they have for their amusement a large yard behind the house, the use of the Linen Hall out of market hours, and a bowling green half a mile out of town". == Promoted by Elizabeth Hamilton ==

It is unlikely that Elizabeth Hamilton, one of the most noted female writers of her day, attended Manson's school unless briefly before leaving Belfast for Scotland in 1762 at age six. But her elder sister Katherine had done so, and she was well acquainted with his methods. They occasioned a lengthy discourse on child education in Hamilton's best-known work, The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808). The fictional Mr Gourley directs the village teachers Mrs Mason and Mr Morrison's in reorganising their school on a spare-the-rod monitorial system. He cites David Manson's account of "what he calls his play school; the regulations of which are so excellent, that every scholar must have been made insensibly to teach himself, while he all the time considered himself as assisting the master in teaching others". In a footnote Hamilton assures the reader that she does not intend to "detract from the praise so justly due" to the educational reformer Joseph Lancaster (1778-1838), but observes that in "some of his most important improvements, [had] been anticipated by the schoolmaster of Belfast". Manson's "extraordinary talents" had been "exerted in too limited a sphere to attract attention". == Child-centered pedagogy ==

Hamilton's praise for Manson was consistent with her admiration for his younger contemporary, the renowned Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Yet while Manson's co-operative and meritocratic system of "sensory, logical and child-orientated" education may have foreshadowed some of the experiments usually ascribed to a new school of educationalists inspired by Rousseau, there is no evidence that he was influenced by Continental theorists. What is suggested is that John Locke's child-centred pedagogical theories "set the terms by which education was debated in eighteenth century Ireland", and that, consciously or not, Manson's pedagogy was "an exemplar of the Lockean approach". Manson does refer to Locke, but it is to distinguish his own "Plan for the improvement of children in virtue and learning" (1764) as being one entirely "without the use of the rod". While Locke (Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693) allows for physical correction in cases of "obstinacy". Manson suggests that direct challenges to a teacher's authority can be avoided either by "the force of example" or by proposing what is otherwise commanded as "a matter of choice, or as a particular favour granted the child". Such alternatives may take "more time than the discipline of the rod", but "the rod only quenches the flame [of resentment] which will break out afterwards in greater fury than before". Thus, for Manson "knowledge, diligence and sobriety are not sufficient qualifications" in a teacher. There has to be the "patience, benevolence and a peculiar turn of mind by which [he] can make a course of education an entertainment to himself as well as to the children". ==Co-education==

In terms of female education, Manson's English Grammar School was the most important establishment in Belfast. It has been compared with the leading, and contemporaneous, co-education establishment in Dublin, the English Grammar School of Samuel Whyte, who, with Locke, similarly believed that, for girls and boys alike, education should be engaging and enjoyable. ==Manson's publications==

Manson's Belfast school produced a magazine, The Lilliputian, and a newspaper, to which, presumably, both teachers and pupils contributed. But of these there appears to be no record. and, as described by Drennan, contained "tables from monosyllables to polysyllables" so arranged as to emphasise the "natural sound of letters". it does include a general exposition of his pedagogy: notes on "A Plan for the improvement of children in virtue and learning: without the use of the rod". ==Mechanical invention==

Manson acquired a plot of land, under Cavehill, on the old Carrickfergus Road on which he built both cottage for his father. Here, in addition to a bowling green, Manson built for his pupils (and, at a small fee, for the townspeople) a "machine by which he could raise persons above every house in town for an amusing prospect", possibly a fair-ground "high-swing boat affair", a velocipede or bicycle—the "flying chariot". or glider. Manson also invented a multiple spinning wheel. Allowing women and girls to spin flax while attending only to their hands, he presented it to the Belfast Charitable Society, the town's poorhouse and hospital. == Manson's legacy ==

Manson's ideas were carried forward by the hedge-school masters to whom he gave free instruction. In December 1862 an Antrim paper, The Larne Monthly Visitor, described "Manson's dictionary and spelling book" as "still in large demand over the country". Drennan was fulsome in his admiration for Manson, describing him as "the best friend of the rising generations of his time". these reflected something of the spirit of his proscribed Society of United Irishmen. Admission was to be "perfectly unbiased by religious distinctions" and school government was entrusted democratically to boards of subscribers and boards of masters. But is likely that the commitment to rest discipline on "example" rather than on the "manual correction of corporal punishment" owed something to Manson whose portrait was to hang in the new Institution. The same year the foundation stone was laid for Drennan's Academical Institution, 1810, a "Lancastrian School" was opened in Frederick Street for "the children of the lower classes". However, the rationale that Joseph Lancaster, visiting Belfast, offered for his peer-tutoring method was reduced to a matter of economy. He described a "mechanical system of education" whereby "above one thousand children may be governed by one master only, at an expense reduced to five shillings per annum". Like Manson, Lancaster had rejected corporal punishment but he did not share the older schoolmaster's trust in the power of "amusement": discipline in Lancastrian could be harsh with children brutally restrained and shamed. The Ulster poet ("rhyming weaver") James Orr is said to have remembered David Manson when, in his Elegy Written in the Ruins of a Country Schoolhouse (1817) he decried those who insisted their children be drilled, as they had been, in "the Catechism, the Youth's Companion and the Holy Word" and who thus denied them "elocution's grace" and "grammar's art". Manson, who In 1779 had received the freedom of the borough, was accorded on his death in 1792 the honour in Belfast of a torchlit funeral attended by a large crowd drawn from all classes of society. He and his wife had no children. ==References==