Abstraction, intuition, and the “monad tutorial fallacy”
The heart of the matter is that people begin with the concrete, and move to the abstract. Humans are very good at pattern recognition, so this is a natural progression. By examining concrete objects in detail, one begins to notice similarities and patterns, until one comes to understand on a more abstract, intuitive level.
This is a hobby horse of mine, and something so much casual pedagogy gets wrong.