>There is something to be said about struggling through learning difficult material on your ownDepends on what the difficulty is. I remember when I started to learn programming back in 1991, I was learning from books. These books were very expensive and I could only afford a few of them. I didn't have access to a library because I wasn't in any school or university. I was a musician with a side job at a theatre box office.
My main problem was that many of the explanations and examples in my programming books left some questions unanswered. It was even worse with maths, which I also tried to learn at the time. I got stuck a lot. If I'd had access to something like stackoverflow or Google, I could have progressed much much faster.
I do think that getting stuck and being forced to figure something out the hard way is sometimes useful. But more often than not I didn't get stuck because the material was actually difficult or because I was solving difficult problems. I got stuck because the one and only explanation available to me was imprecise or incomplete. All I needed was the same thing explained with slightly different words to clear up my misunderstandings.
On the whole I think learning these things today is immeasurably more productive. People are a lot less dependent on luck or money. You don't need to be one of the lucky few who has access to good teachers. You don't have to buy expensive books. Everyone has access to excellent online tutorials, documentation, source code and to thousands of competent professionals willing to help for free. It's absolute heaven. Back then it was hell.