If they are making you memorize fixed meanings for the cards and requiring that you read with some patented reading style, then it would be very very very bad.
What's bad about that? It seems a perfectly valid place to start. I may well be a minority personality type here, but, say a teacher gives me an assignment, and it's something like "Compose a sonnet!" and we haven't studied sonnets, and I don't know the form. I can't just "use my intuition." I'm going to write a terrible sonnet and be dissatisfied. I'm of the sort that wants to study the form, learn it, *follow it*, and then *consciously* break the form afterwords, from purpose rather than ignorance.
Similarly with tarot. Why not start with a coherent system, and then later decide if you want to alter it, and why? *Within* a given reading, I'd expect, people do in fact follow one system with fixed meanings. I'd be very suprised if, say, someone read for me from a Celtic Cross spread, and said something like "Ooo- lots of swords in the first 6 cards. It seems that mental conflict is around you. Lots of swords in the last 4 also - that's talking about your emotions." Because of course, whatever one attribute to swords to, one doesn't swap out with other suits during a reading.
Now, some people may in fact do that, and get good results, but I'd say at that point they aren't *reading tarot* but rather *scrying* with it.
