Requiring students to learn facts, as is common under the didactic system, is no longer a viable proposition. We need to equip our students with all the necessary skills to be able to locate and evaluate any information they need. In a society where we are bombarded with often contradictory information, we must cultivate the abilitity to evaluate it critically. Students have had neither the need nor the opportunity to develop critical literacy in the class thus far. The authoritative nature of the didactic approach, combined with the use of textbooks as the primary delivery mechanism for information favours the largely uncritical acceptance of information.
Textbooks are static and usually out of date by the time they are printed.
Worse still, because of budgetary concerns, textbooks usually must be adopted a minimum of several years, and so students must face a built-in obsolescence in the information they receive. In addition, textbooks need to please a broad diversity and wide audience, leading to a dilution and compromising of their contents. Political concerns aside, textbooks also come to the student pre-filtered. Somebody else, either the author or the librarian that chose the book, decided whether the material was relevant or appropriate to the student's needs. For these reasons, students have little opportunity to gain access to raw, unfiltered, even contradictory information with which to challenge their critical literacy.