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Things are taught to you all life long. Obviously the more "intense" time is when you are a child... This is what spring to my mind when thinking about things "taught":

My father was a qualified "Ebeniste d'Art" (Ecole Boule, Paris)and the son of a painter, alas not a famous one but still, he in turn was taught by his father the art of drawing. The first drawing lesson my father gave me was on how to quickly draw a cat. He took a blank sheet of paper, a sharp pencil, and in the middle started to draw the beginning of a semi-circle and he said: "to draw the shape of sitting cat, just draw a pear like so. Then just add the two ears, and if you like to add a tail, just do this (he drew a "banana")". Well to this day, I still remember the pear and banana composition and the fact that this "fruit salad" did look like a sitting cat from behind!

Then much later, at Art school, one of my teachers explained to us how to start a human face: "Just draw an egg like so and "slice" is in three equal thirds. That is if you don't intend to draw the portrait of someone in particular because the three third theory is hardly ever seen". There again another useful shortcut that I found illuminating and so helpful. He also told us that the ideal hight for a human body (in a drawing/painting) is 7 heads from "head to toe"...



Another teacher told us that in order to make a shadow more striking one had to never use any black to darken the background colour: "mix the three primary colours and then add a touch of the complementary colour in!"

All these are simple things but to me they are more valuable than great theories...