Because its primary use is in building and construction, if you wanted to study math, you would have to become involved in house construction or boatbuilding or in some other physical project that required the use of mathematics. This would give readers the best English description of how human beings come to acquire knowledge. To familiarize one's self with something is to become acquainted with, accustomed to, and to make commonly known. That would be ludicrous. Yet, educators ask children to memorize reference manuals all day long.
Educators say that memorizing a subject is the same thing as studying a subject.
However, memorizing is the exact opposite of studying. If you are going to memorize a subject, you must disassociate yourself from the function and the purpose of the subject being studied. You must then divide that subject into fragmented data bits and then memorize the words that describe these fragmented data bits. You would be given a book that listed and described these parts and that broke the subject of photography down into isolated data bits. You would then be asked to memorize all of these isolated data bits.