The widespread poverty of expression in English, which is thus a matter of “how,” and to which we are awakening, must be corrected chiefly, at least at first, by the elementary schools.  The home is the ideal place for it, but the average home in many districts is no longer a possible place for it.  The child of parents poorly educated and bred in limited circumstances, the child of powerful provincial influences, must all depend on the school for standards of English.

And it is the elementary school which must meet the need, if it is to be met at all.  For the conception of English expression which I am talking of can find no mode of instruction adequate to its meaning, save in constant appeal to the ear, at an age so early that unconscious habit is formed.  No rules, no analytical instruction in later development, can accomplish what is needed.  Hearing and speaking; imitating, unwittingly and wittingly, a good model; it is to this method we must look for redemption from present conditions.

I believe we are on the eve of a real revolution in English teaching,—­only it is a revolution which will not break the peace.  It will introduce a larger proportion of oral work than has hitherto been contemplated in secondary school work.  It will recognise the fact that English is primarily something spoken with the mouth and heard with the ear.  And this recognition will have greatest weight in the systems of elementary teaching.

It is as an aid in oral teaching of English that story-telling in school finds its second value; ethics is the first ground of its usefulness, English the second,—­and after these, the others.  It is, too, for the oral uses that the secondary forms of story-telling are so available.  By secondary I mean those devices which I have tried to indicate, as used by many teachers, in the chapter on “Specific Schoolroom Uses,” in my earlier book.  They are retelling, dramatisation, and forms of seat-work.  All of these are a great power in the hands of a wise teacher.  If combined with much attention to voice and enunciation in the recital of poetry, and with much good reading aloud by the teacher, they will go far toward setting a standard and developing good habit.

But their provinces must not be confused or overestimated.  I trust I may be pardoned for offering a caution or two to the enthusiastic advocate of these methods,—­cautions the need of which has been forced upon me, in experience with schools.

A teacher who uses the oral story as an English feature with little children must never lose sight of the fact that it is an aid in unconscious development; not a factor in studied, conscious improvement.  This truth cannot be too strongly realised.  Other exercises, in sufficiency, give the opportunity for regulated effort for definite results, but the story is one of the play-forces.  Its use in English teaching is most valuable when the teacher has a keen appreciation of the natural order of growth in the