This actually is a fairly controversial stance in education, so there's reason to be combative about it. A lot of education tends to emphasize meeting students where they are to the point that it can completely subsume the irreducibility of complexity when confronting some knowledge conceptually; one _can_ be better served instead by attempting to memorize some bulky, impenetrable abstraction and instead make sense of it through its application. A lot of knowledge only becomes clearer when one forges ahead with a dim appreciation of what is being articulated but the confidence, willingness, and (most crucially) feedback mechanism for testing it out anyway.