The theory of didactic learning methods focuses on the baseline knowledge students possess and seeks to improve upon and convey this information.
Didacticism was indeed the cultural origin of the didactic method but refers within its narrow context usually pejoratively to the use of language to a doctrinal end.
It was particularly the later appearance of Romanticism and Aestheticism in the Anglo-Saxon world which offered these negative and limiting views of the didactic method.
On the other hand, in continental Europe those moralising aspects of didactics were removed earlier by cultural representatives of the Age of Enlightenment, such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and later specifically related to teaching by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.
With the advent of globalisation at the beginning of the 20th century, however, the arguments for such relative philosophical aspects in the methods of teaching started to diminish somewhat.
Didactics is descriptive and diachronic ("what is" and "what was"), as opposed to pedagogy, the other discipline related to educational theorizing, which is normative or prescriptive and synchronic ("what should or ought to be") in nature.
Didactics can be said to provide the descriptive foundation for pedagogy, which is more concerned with educational goal-setting and with the learner's becoming a social subject and their future role in society.
[2] In continental Europe, as opposed to English-speaking research cultures, pedagogy and didactics are distinct areas of study.
The first step, called the "external transposition" (transposition externe), is about how the "scholarly knowledge" (savoir savant) produced by the scholars, scientists or specialists of a certain discipline in a research context, i.e., at universities and other academic institutions is transformed into "knowledge to teach" (savoir à enseigner) by precisely selecting, rearranging and defining the knowledge which will be taught (the official curriculum for each discipline) and how it will be taught, so that it becomes an object of learning accessible to the learner.
Learning which also involves motivating the students to develop an interest towards the subject may not be satisfied through this teaching method.