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I’ve been to Milan. Nice cathedral, so long as you ignore the centuries of Catholic Church fuckery. But it’s not just Catholics who were dicks in that northern Italian city. In 1880 a group of Deaf educators got together and totally fucked over Deaf people for the next century.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: September 6, 1880--
It was called the Second International Congress on the Education of the Deaf, the first one having been two years previous in Paris. Lasting five days, it began on September 6, 1880, and some stupid-as-fuck decisions were made. Basically, they said oralism is best, and they weren’t talking about the good kind of oral.
Oralism is teaching Deaf people to communicate via the use of lip reading, and teaching them to speak despite the fact that they can’t hear what they’re saying. Just mimic the hearing folk, Deaf person, and don’t put up a fuss. In addition to being a dick move, it was a shitty way of teaching Deaf people to communicate, and that’s why it’s not used much anymore except in conjunction with cochlear implants (the use of which are controversial in the Deaf community), which didn’t fucking exist in 1880.
But they didn’t just say oralism was best at this congress, referring to its “incontestable superiority,” they fucking banned the teaching of sign language. These asswipes asserted that banning sign language and promoting oralism would better serve them in “restoring the deaf-mute to society and giving him a fuller knowledge of the language.” Even though sign language schools had existed for a century, all of a sudden, schools for the Deaf across Europe said hey no more of that. Learn to talk like everyone else.
There were some delegates from the U.S. and Britain who said wait a minute why not both? But the rest said fuck you we’re all or none on this oralism shit. Some American schools muttered no fuck you and allowed for some teaching of sign language, although oralism was still largely favored and plenty of schools jumped on the banning sign language bandwagon. Alexander Graham Bell, who had a Deaf mother, was anti sign language and campaigned hard for oralism education.
It was a hundred fucking years later when the 15th such congress, held in Hamburg in 1980, said wait a goddamn minute, this is bullshit. It was the first time the findings of the 1880 congress were informally repudiated. They didn’t throw out oralism but rather said “all deaf children have the right to flexible communication.” The Milan resolutions were seen as both impractical and immoral.
In 2010 in Vancouver, during the 21st congress, a formal rejection of the Milan resolutions was voted, and an apology was offered to the Deaf community for the lasting negative repercussions such resolutions had caused, referring to them as discriminatory and a violation of human rights.
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