The discouragement of private Bible study is not uncommon in certain "Christian" religions. Many Churches claim exclusive authority to interpret it, and discourage, or outright forbid any attempt to read what the Bible says, much less compare it to the teachings of their Church.
There is a very obvious reason for this: These Churches know that their teachings are very much incompatible with the Bible. When we study the Bible, it's not hard to see that these organisations are heretical. You may notice I haven't mentioned any of them by name. This is because doing so would not serve the purpose of this article, as each of them have several mutually exclusive doctrines. Refuting one of them would not make a dent on the others. But there is one teaching all of them have in common: "Don't test us".
This teaching is easily demolished by the Bible, and thus all of these religions, which claim exclusive authority over it, are swept away like sand under a pressure washer when we compare them to it.
It's safe to say that the words of Paul are rather a big deal in Christianity. He wrote quite a large portion of scripture, and Peter even recognises this fact (2 Peter 3:16). Paul believed he was preaching the truth, the other Apostles affirmed he was preaching the truth, and any religion with a Bible must believe he preached the truth. And yet, Paul not only told us to test all things and hold on to the good (1 Thessalonians 5:21), he submitted to such tests himself.
A perfect example can be found in Acts 17. When Paul and Silas preached the Gospel in Berea, the Bereans searched the scriptures daily to see if Paul was preaching the truth. At no point did Paul discourage this. He did not usurp authority that wasn't his, he did not warn them that such tests were futile, he actually encouraged them to do so. But if that wasn't enough, when Luke wrote about this account, he called the Bereans "fair minded" (Acts 17:11) for doing so.
My friends, it is fair minded to search the scriptures daily to see if what your teachers are telling you is true. And when what they are preaching is true, they will confidently allow you, even encourage you, to do this. But when they are not confident they are preaching the truth, when they know they are lying through their teeth, when they are fully aware that they could not stand up to the scrutiny of God's word, that's when they keep the Bible under lock and key. Doing so is not only a tacit admission that they can't stand the test of scripture, but is an automatic failure of the test of scripture. If your teachers do not actively encourage you to test them against the scriptures, they are not Godly teachers, and you should leave them to walk into the pit of Hell alone.