e Bible to be the word of God. The way the children felt about Bible stories, the way they perceived Jesus, and any kind of imaginative responses to stories were considered irrelevant, and not rewarded by the Sunday school teacher.
Having set up the scenario for Zinsser's study, it is possible to proceed with some generalities about "forms of thought" relevant to the literacy hypothesis in this setting. If a literal interpretation is given to a text (in this case the Bible, as the literal word of God), the literate-to-be will come to expect that what they read and what they hear are both true, and only true in one possible way. A second generality relates to communication. The literate-to-be in this setting will be less able to exchange information, whether oral or written, because they have been subjected to a pedagogical mode of repetition, sing-song memorization, and strict stimulus-response answer giving.
With regard to the literacy hypothesis, it is important to note that the children's consciousness has not been transformed; instead, it has remained fixed in a state of complacency and automatism. When their Sunday school teachers read the children their stimulus- and response-oriented questions, the children sometimes missed their cues at a "right" response and gave a "wrong" one instead. Rather than pausing to actually listen to what the children say, the teacher proceeded through the exercise as if she had heard the proper Godly response--no alternative responses were rewarded. All children know that they should be "good," (one of the children's miscued responses), but God's children must "obey" (the correct response, missed by the children) (Zinsser, 1986, p. 9).
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