Economics is a good case study. When I went back to college as a 'mature student' I took a number of courses in business administration, law and economics. Law was quite straight forward once you understood that law and justice have nothing to do with one another. Business administration was really just studying case studies, which is simply a mechanism for passing along experience. Economics however is a king among hated subjects, because nobody understands what the economists are trying to teach. I am now fervently of the opinion that this is because in truth, economists themselves truly know very little about economics, largely because there is so little to know. For them to admit this would greatly diminish their importance and so they have invented the most incredible mess of formulas and graphs that are so esoteric as to occult the true extent of how simple the economy really is. Any student of economics must, before they realize the fundamental inutility of all this, invest years of study. By which time they too must, in order to preserve the importance of the time they have invested (and their future careers), defend the importance of the crap they have studied.
In my first economics classes I was stymied by these excuses for math. The rest of the students calmly did what they were told and memorized everything without trying to understand. The educational system has never tried to foster understanding (likely because understanding is a scarce commodity) and so for these students, simply accepting whatever was fed to them and regurgitating it later for the exam, was normal. For me however understanding was essential, for I refuse to memorize bullshit.
For a couple of months I struggled with the subject, learning nothing. I perused the textbook and the suggested reading list and understood virtually nothing. The teacher seemed helpless to explain things any other way than with her graphs, likely because she too had memorized everything and understood nothing. Then one day I happened upon a suggested reading list compiled by dissident economists, whose views were so radical as for them to be ostracized from the majority, and unheard of in the classrooms, the 'Chicago school'. This reading list contained references to several writings that explained in very simple lay terms the basic forces at work in a free market and also how government policy affected that market. When I discovered these books I devoured them and immediately started passing my exams with the highest marks that had been seen in a long time in that school. I still knew nothing about their graphs and formulas, but I could now understand the questions.
Dawson College hired me to run their economics resource center and to tutor their students. I corrupted hundreds.