Its former assistant headmaster Thomas MacDonagh and other teachers including Pearse; games master Con Colbert; Pearse's brother, Willie, the art teacher, and Joseph Plunkett, and occasional lecturer in English, were executed by the British after the 1916 Rising. Pearse and MacDonagh were two of the seven leaders who signed the Irish Declaration of Independence. Pearse's book The Murder Machine[32] was a denunciation of the English school system of the time and a declaration of his own educational principles.