The thing said may look the same on a printed page, but it is not the same when spoken.  And it is the spoken sentence which is the original and the usual mode of communication.

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 common schools.  The home is the ideal place for it, but the average home of the United States is no longer a possible place for it.  The child of foreign parents, the child of parents little 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.  The new way will leave an overwhelming preponderance of oral methods in use up to the fifth or sixth grade, and will introduce a larger proportion of oral work than has ever been contemplated in grammar and high school work.  It will recognize 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 American teachers, in the chapter on “Specific Schoolroom Uses,” in my earlier book.  They are re-telling, dramatization, 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.