If you set up all the study yourself, resources, study plan, teach yourself from books, learn from websites then you find that you'll actually learn it alot better.
For example, I only really knew the entire process of rusting for chemistry not because of the vague concept the book gives me, but because I read very in detail what it does then when I got it more summarised I understood it. Some people are like that, they can't learn something unless they know how it works inside out. You'll find for some subjects that may be the case, often explaining means going in more detail than required to learn something really not that hard.