One of the advantages that I gained in Shar Yashuv and later the Mir in NY was listening from people that knew Torah very well. [Naftali Yeager, Shmuel Berenbaum]. I have suspected that it is impossible to come to understand "how to learn " without receiving it from someone that knows.

And even after all that I still never really got the idea until years later I began to learn with David Bronson and then seeing this same sort of deep learning and then it finally started to sink unto me what it is all about.

I mean to say that there have been self taught people like Abraham Lincoln, but I wonder how far that can go? 

Maybe if Abraham Lincoln had gone to university, and did not have to rely only on self taught learning, maybe he would have realized that it was the North that was the rebel. In the Constitution and in the Federalist Papers there can not be anything more clear than the fact that the Federal Government has only enumerated powers things stated openly that the Constitution grants to the Federal Government. In any case, I sometimes think that anyone could get the iea just by learning a lot of Tosphot, Rav Chaim of Brisk, the Avi Ezri of Rav Shach. Other times it seems that one needs to listen to a teacher that knows all this.