> By reading indiscriminately, I learned to discriminate—and learned also to comprehend: for it’s only with the acquisition of large data sets that we also develop schemas supple enough to interpret new material.

That's a good sentence. I've observed the same about the biology curriculum we went through at university. The first few semesters were just huge amounts of information we had to absorb, because it wasn't until we had an extensive foundation of the basics that we could actually start to think about and interpret and criticise new research.

And I guess it's the same with any other area of human knowledge: you have to reach a certain knowledge threshold before you can really understand the systems behind the subject.