I'm not knocking the musical theory, I'd love to understand more about it. It's just that I get into theory by trying to make sense out of stuff that has interested me in practice (in all kinds of fields), and I've observed that some people seem to work the other way round.

And I've also seen how the two sorts of people often do in fact tend to take it for granted that the people they are teaching, or dealing with in other ways, think the same way as they do.

I think that this misunderstanding lies at the root of a lot of problems that arise, both in teaching and in other settings.