Renata Vann is a social studies teacher at Cedar Ridge Secondary who believes that genuine inquiry should encourage critical thinking, even if doing so means questioning what is printed in the textbook. Part of the curriculum deals with how the first peoples reached the Americas, and Vann was dismayed to find the textbook material to be "little more than a settled story, which claims that the earliest arrivals walked south through an ice-free corridor between the glaciers."

Vann argues that education is supposed to teach students to weigh evidence for themselves, yet textbooks often privilege certain viewpoints and present them as the only truth. In the case of the first migration, she was troubled to find that no other route was so much as mentioned. "The absence of any alternative suggests that this subject has hardened into a kind of orthodoxy that leaves no room for honest debate," Vann says.