DEAFNESS, MILAN CONGRESS OF 1880 ON

In 1880, a congress for the Deaf was held in Milan. The delegates saw an attack on sign language and thereby on the possibilities for their emancipation. Even for some years previously, the “oral method” for the instruction of the deaf had predominated in state institutions and private schools in Europe. Yet there was still not unanimity in the matter. Some schools remained faithful to the French method inherited from Abbé de l'Épée, which consisted of gestural signs and writing. And within certain national institutions, some teachers, deaf and hearing, defended the use of signs despite the increasing hegemony of partisans of the oral method. Among the latter are some of the hearing teachers at schools in Paris, Bordeaux, and Chambery; the instructors in the schools created by the Pereire family; the Brothers of St. Gabriel, a religious order devoted to the education of the deaf; and the Protestant teachers of St. Hippolyte du Fort in the Cévennes in the south of France.

All these educators wished to ratify the dominance of the oral method and make it exclusive. Debates took place at the Milan congress, and they were at times quite fierce, especially on the part of Italian delegates, who advanced religious arguments: the need for communication in order to confess and be absolved, or the fact that, since God had given man the faculty of speech, all good Christians ought to speak whereas signing was proof of mental retardation or degeneration.

A vote was taken, and an overwhelming majority of delegates (almost all hearing; France had only one deaf teacher as representative) passed resolutions that all had the same orientation: The oral method was to be preferred over mimicry. Since deaf signing had the disadvantage of being detrimental to speech and even to the precise expression of ideas, it was preferable to suppress sign language. Yet all deaf-mutes needed to be educated and governments were encouraged to take the necessary steps. Not all participants supported these resolutions and the American representative, Edward Miner Gallaudet, criticized them sharply, arguing that the country with the greatest number of deaf pupils, the United States, had only 5 delegates at the [Page 361]congress, while Italy had 87 and France 56, of a total of 164.

Since their passage by state and private teachers, and by administrators from France and Italy, the resolutions in favor of the strict oral method have been experienced by the deaf as an injustice and a denial of their language—sign language—all the more so since they were thenceforth also excluded from the education of their peers. The oral method, far from facilitating social integration of deaf children, had the opposite effect: withdrawal, underpaid employment, and medicalization while at the same time the deaf were proving their social competence through the creation of newspapers, the foundation of mutual aid societies, and the administration of athletic associations, in particular, for cycling. The newspapers, aid societies, and associations were confiscated from the deaf on the pretext that they should stop signing and that they must speak. Otherwise, they would be abnormal, disabled.

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