Being taught something has little correlation with learning it, and even less with remembering it years later.

Perhaps just because it suits my learning style, I find learning is actually easier if I attempt to work something out or guess it, and then am corrected when wrong, because then I have a memory to anchor it on. If I skip that part and just try to learn some facts, very little is retained. One consequence of this is that I prefer science / logic based subjects to things like history or geography (as in places, etc, not the science parts) where it's just a bunch of arbitrary facts that you can't just guess or work out for yourself.