Milan Conference — Sign Language Banned in Deaf Education
At the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf in Milan in 1880, hearing educators voted to adopt oral methods exclusively in Deaf education, effectively banning sign languages from schools for Deaf children worldwide. The decision devastated Deaf communities globally and set back Deaf education and culture for nearly a century.
The Milan Conference
The Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf was held in Milan, Italy, in September 1880. It was attended by approximately 164 delegates from countries including the US, UK, France, Italy, and Germany. Critically, the overwhelming majority of delegates were hearing; Deaf educators and community members had little meaningful representation.
The conference voted — with only the American delegation dissenting — to adopt two resolutions that would reshape Deaf education for generations:
- That oral education (speech and lip-reading) was superior to sign education, and should be preferred
- That the simultaneous use of sign language and oral methods was harmful and should be abolished
The Immediate Impact
Following Milan 1880, schools for Deaf children across Europe, North America, and elsewhere rapidly replaced sign language instruction with oral methods. Deaf teachers — who had been central to Deaf education — were dismissed en masse. Students were punished for using sign language.
The impact on Deaf communities was devastating. Deaf children were required to learn through methods many found inaccessible and exhausting. Educational outcomes declined sharply. Transmission of Deaf culture and signed languages to younger generations was severely disrupted.
In the United States, the proportion of Deaf teachers in schools for Deaf students fell from about 40% in 1880 to 12% by 1920. By the mid-twentieth century, sign language was stigmatised not just in schools but within Deaf families and communities.
The Reversal
The harm of Milan 1880 was not formally acknowledged for 130 years. At the Vancouver conference in 2010 — also the International Congress on Education of the Deaf (ICED) — delegates formally apologised for the decisions made in Milan, called on all nations to ensure that Deaf children have access to sign language, and repudiated the resolutions of 1880.
Linguistic research beginning with William Stokoe's 1960 work on American Sign Language established sign languages as full, natural human languages — not inferior communication systems, not gestural representations of spoken language, but independent languages with their own grammar, syntax, and expressive capacity. This research provided the scientific foundation for the rehabilitation of sign languages in Deaf education.
Legacy
Milan 1880 is regarded in the Deaf community as a catastrophic act of cultural and linguistic suppression. It is central to Deaf history and to understanding why the Deaf community's relationship to hearing authorities and institutions is marked by a profound history of distrust. The conference is also a lesson in the harms of making decisions about a community without meaningful representation from that community — a principle the disability rights movement would later capture in the phrase "Nothing About Us Without Us."