I came at C after doing 6502 and 8086 assembler. Pointers just made sense because working with indirect addressing and understanding how things were stored in memory already made sense.
The way a lot of teachers teach it is plain trash. I was raking terrible grades in OCaml and C before a student showed me what I needed to know in 15 minutes, and then I would kill it in the remaining exams. Same thing happened to my 68000 course. It didn't happen with every teacher but still, some people really need to get some better pedagogy.
I assume the pun is that education is a discipline like any other. Asking questions, gathering evidence, testing hypotheses, publishing, lecturing etc. Not to discredit people who are naturally fantastic at figuring things out along the way. It just isn't the systemic approach academia believes in.