Firstly, a little Deaf history leading up to Milan 1880...

At the beginning of the time when records started, the situation of Deaf people was usually negative.

Deaf people were perceived as being uneducable by Aristotle (“it is impossible to reason without the ability to hear”) and St Augustine (“faith comes only through hearing”). In the Mediterranean countries Roman law forbade the inheritance of family fortunes by those who could not speak.

The first known teacher of the Deaf was Pedro Ponce de Leon, a Spanish monk (early 1500s). He taught an 18-year-old Deaf son of a Mayor to say a few words. Deaf sons of rich people were able to ‘perform’ speech to gain inheritance, and also were able to overcome the stigma of producing abnormal children that existed within their social circles. These wealthy parents were willing to pay anyone who could make their Deaf children “normal”.

Pedro Ponce de Leon’s success encouraged further education techniques for the Deaf. He was followed by Manuel Ramirez de Carrion (late 1500s), the man who is seen as the inventor of speech training for Deaf people.

Carrion taught speech using a phonetic method, which involved pronouncing individual letters of the alphabet correctly. By associating individual letters with specific sounds, Carrion claimed that he could teach the Deaf to speak. The training in speech involved learning to make vowel sounds using a model tongue!

Another important figure around that time was Juan Pablo Martin Bonet. Bonet was the first to publish a method for educating the Deaf. According to this method, the Deaf were taught to read, write, and use the one-handed manual alphabet system.

The impact of the work of these great Spanish pioneers was felt throughout Europe, including the UK.

Around the 1750s, certain important developments took place in France.

A French priest, Charles Micael Abbé de l’Epee, was very concerned that Deaf people were not receiving the sacraments. According to the beliefs of the Church, failure to receive the sacraments would send them to Hell. Yet he did not know how to help them.

One day, he noticed two Deaf girls communicating with each other in their own sign language. He observed them carefully, and could soon exchange simple ideas with them. After a short time, he had learned their language and found that he could communicate complicated religious ideas to them.

In 1760, he opened at first a shelter for the poor Deaf, and by 1762/3 he had created a school for the education of the Deaf in Paris. Before de l’Epee opened the school, education was only available to rich deaf children. He gave educational opportunities to poor deaf children. Almost immediately, he was overwhelmed with the number of poor deaf children coming to his school.

He very soon came to the conclusion that teaching through sign language was proving to be effective and efficient. He developed a very high and well-structured educational system for deaf children. He also invented new signs to show grammatical features of the French language. His system for teaching the Deaf became known as the French Method which became the foundatioin of the world's sign languages to this day.

One of de Epee’s students, the Abbé Sicard, continued his work. He opened a school of his own, and in 1818 he published an important study called “Theory of Signs”, which included a grammar and dictionary of sign language.

From the 1780s onwards, Deaf people had no problems with education, and they were even writing books (e.g. Ferdinand Berthier and others). It should be noted that most of the important Deaf writers during the next century were French, where education via sign language was the norm.

Ferdinand Berthier was a gifted Deaf student. He became a teacher’s assistant at 21, a professor at 26, and then became the Dean of Professors. During his time he was a well-known writer, his works including biographies of Epee and Sicard. He was also a political man who fought for the rights of signing deaf people.

Another leading Deaf professor was Pierre Pelissier. In 1844 he published a collection of poems that were very well received. Pelissier was fluent in French and French Sign Language, a skilful poet in both languages. Pelissier hated oralism and loved to sign. He disagreed with the oral method and went around saying so. He also published the first sign dictionary.

There is also evidence that Deaf people were successful lawyers, artists, politicians and so on.

Parallel to these positive developments, in 1770 a Swiss doctor called Johann Conrad Amman wrote a famous book called “The Speaking Deaf”, in which he strongly stated that the oral method was the best for deaf people.

Amman’s ideas about the importance of speech and speech reading were followed in Germany by Samuel Heinicke. Around the same time as the Abbé de l’Epee founded his school in Paris, Samuel Heinicke was developing in Germany his own oral approach to teaching the Deaf. Heinicke’s oral approach became so popular it became known as the German Method.

Epee also had a strong French rival, Jacob Rodrigues Pereire, a leading Oralist who had often challenged Epee's work and his legacy. He was developing "secret" methods on how to instruct deaf pupils orally. Epee, at one time, invited Pereire to his school to prove that the deaf could be educated through signs, and Epee seemed to have made his point - or so he thought. How was he, or anyone else, to know that Jacob Pereire would have the last laugh almost a century later!

Thomas Braidwood opened the first school for the education of deaf children in Britain in the first quarter of 1760 in Edinburgh. This, and other early schools, used the idea of what we call the combined system, which is the forerunner of “total communication” - the use of sign language and speech at the same time. Under this system, Deaf Braidwoodian pupils excelled and went on to achieve great things - two became members of the Royal Society, one went on to become an Auditor of Excise (Scotland), seven went on to become noted artists, and so on.

In the USA, Thomas Hoplins Gallaudet founded the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, and used sign language (based on de l’Epee’s methods). But at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Massachusetts, the oral methods developed by Heinicke were strongly advocated by Alexander Graham Bell.!

An important point to make here is that Abbé de l’Epee and Heinicke were rivals. De l’Epee was a strong supporter of education through sign language and Heinicke an advocate of the oral method. There were similar tensions between oral and sign methods in the UK and USA.

It is interesting that the argument on the topic of Sign Language v Oralism happened then, and it’s still happening now

The climax of the controversy regarding oral versus sign language in the schools for the deaf came in 1880, at the Second International Congress on the Education of the Deaf in Milan.

Milan 1880. No other event in the history of deaf education had a greater impact on the lives and education of deaf people. This single event almost destroyed sign language and created a turbulent legacy.

Next – The Congress