I only learnt about separation of powers doing a law degree (for fun).
I learned that as a result of wondering from an early age what made the US system different to the UK. The starting point of which is you need to understand the UK (with a note that England and Wales have different antecedents to Scotland). My interest being more historical than legal.
That said, you really don't need too much background info to appreciate writers such as (the incomparable) P.J. O'Rourke. Who may as well have been describing EU agriculture when he wrote:
There is one kind of interfering in private life that the federal government has been doing for much longer than it has been proscribing narcotics or hectoring poor people, and this is messing around with agriculture. The government began formulating agricultural policy in 1794, when the residents of western Pennsylvania started the Whiskey Rebellion in response to an excise tax on corn liquor. The agricultural policy formulated in 1794 was to shoot farmers. In this case, the federal government may have had it right the first time.
Like that of most Americans of the present generation, my experience with agriculture is pretty much limited to one three-week experiment raising dead marijuana plants under a grow light in the closet of my off-campus apartment. I did, however, once help artificially inseminate a cow. And you can keep your comments to yourself -I was up at the front, holding the thing's head.
This was a dozen years ago. My old friend George, who'd done all sorts of madcap stuff such as join the marines, go to Vietnam, learn to fly a stunt plane and get married, decided to raise cattle. To that end George bought a farm in New Hampshire, along with some cows (the technical term for female cattle), and now it was time for the cattle to fructify.
Getting a cow in a family way is not accomplished, as I would have thought, with a bull and some Barry White tapes in a heart-shaped stall. It's like teenage pregnancy, only more so. The bull isn't even around to get the cow knocked-up. Instead, there's a liquid-nitrogen Thermos bottle full of frozen bull sperm (let's not even think about how they get that) and a device resembling a cross between a gigantic hypodermic needle and the douche nozzle of the gods.
George got a real farmer to come by and actually do the honors. So while I held the cow's head and George held the cow's middle, the real farmer, Pete, took the bovine marital aid and inserted it into a very personal and private place of the cow's. Then Pete squirted liquid dish soap on himself and inserted his right arm into an even more personal and private place of the cow's, all the way up to the elbow. Pete did this not in order to have Robert Mapplethorpe take his photograph, but in order to grasp the inseminator tube through the intestine wall and guide the tube into the mouth of the uterus. It's an alarming thing to watch, and I'm glad to say I didn't watch it because I was at the cow's other end. But I'll tell you this, I will never forget the look on that cow's face.
The same look-and for the same reason-appeared on my own face when I began reading the 1990 omnibus farm bill. Every five years or so the U.S. Congress votes on a package of agricultural legislation that does to the taxpayer what Pete and George and I did to the cow.