Not sure what you're disagreeing about, but let's take Newton as an example.

He was either oblivious or indifferent to ongoing debates regarding planetary motions. The first is doubtful since it was all the talk, and we know he was interested in the topic so it probably the people or places he didn't care for. It wasn't until Halley approached him that he casually responded he'd already that one sometime earlier.

Heated debates over who deserved credit or scorn for what was also common between the Fellows of the Royal Society. Some got nasty and others were just petty. Newton couldn't care less about all that noise, because he couldn't even find his original work. Halley would have to wait for Newton to write it again from memory. After verifying Newton was the real deal, Halley asked him to share everything else he had worked on. After more than a year without hearing anything from him, Halley assumed that was all Newton had, impressive as it was.

Goes to show how disengaged the field was at that time. Some people were motivated by glory, others fear, some greed. Without motives that are aligned, it's impossible to use the same method to determine values, so even if someone is working on the same thing, they can never agree because their value systems are all wack.

Newton maintained regular communications with one or two people who received recognition and exchanged letters addressing specifics with several others. A healthy dose of scepticism from his peers helped sharpen the arguments. It would be another decade before most of the criticism was ironed out and amendments made. Once his work was widely accepted, the establishments he was associated with lent him credibility and prestige. Besides prodding him to act in the first place, Halley played a significant role in the publishing process as well. All of which helped rapidly disseminate and distribution his revolutionary ideas.

So I agree with you, institutions and academics did help him. I haven't implied there's a problem with higher learning in general. Or academic institutions as a whole can't be trusted. I haven't said the entire concept of teaching academics should be abolished.

The fact remains that after five years at Cambridge, Newton was just another inconsequential student working a part-time job to get by. Without any scheduling constraints along with the freedom to work on whatever he wanted to saw the use of calculus, theory of optics and his law of gravitation. Anyone alone within the course of a lifetime would have immortalised his name in the history book.

The third I now design to suppress. Philosophy is such an impertinently litigious lady, that a man has as good be engaged in lawsuits, as have to do, with her. I found it so formerly, and now I am no sooner come near her again, but she gives me a warning. The two first books, without the third, will not so well bear the title of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica; and therefore I had altered it to this, De Motu Corporum libri duo.

"But, upon second thoughts, I retain the former title. It will help the sale of the book, which I ought not to diminish now it's yours. The articles are with the largest to be called by that name.

I am heartily sorry that in this matter, wherein all mankind ought to acknowledge their obligations to you, you should meet with anything that should give you unquiet"

Sir, I must now again beg you, not to let your resentments run so high, as to deprive us of your third book, wherein the application of your mathematical doctrine to the theory of comets and several curious experiments, which, as I guess by what you write, ought to compose it, will undoubtedly render it acceptable to those, who will call themselves Philosophers without Mathematics, which are much the greater number.

None of that directly addresses my original point though. Education was based on Aristotelian thinking at the time. That was the only option you got at Cambridge or Oxford. New methods that apply critical thinking to achieve empirical results were gaining popularity but still resisted in some circles. Pioneers of the scientific method such as Kepler, Descartes and Bacon took a tentative approach.

Newton took the model to its extreme conclusion. One fell swoop left Jo doubt in anyone's mind that philosophy had been permanently severed from science. He summed it up in three words,

hypotheses non-fingo,

"I formulate no hypotheses"

Newton spent years paying people to teach him how to think, only to discover not a single one of them knew how to.

Like going to a sushi bar to try steak for the first time and leaving convinced that steak must taste and look exactly like sushi.

Or stubbornly arguing that the study of a philosophical concept really is the best path to spiritual enlightenment, despite never being intended for such thing like plenty of other concepts were.