PostgreSQL search_path change not working as advertised

Question

I am using PostgreSQL 9.0.3 on RedHat. The database contains two schemas, public and wh. I created a new role called django. I want this user to use the wh schema as it's default.

Following the manual, I did:

ALTER USER django SET SEARCH_PATH TO wh, public;

This appears to work:

SHOW SEARCH_PATH;
search_path 
-------------
wh, public

However, if I then do a \dt, only tables from the public schema are displayed. In the manual, changing the search path should have an immediate effect, and I should be able to access wh tables without a prefix, but this is not the case. Logging in and out preserves the changes to search_path but does not show any change of behavior.

What am I missing?