&quot;If all I want to do is build bird houses, do I need to learn everything a structural engineer has to learn to build sky scrapers?&quot;<p>Of course not. People should have the choice on how and what they want to learn. I just disagree when choice is turned into equivalence (i.e. formal education providing no value over self-learning &#x2F; disguising knowledge to build bird houses as knowledge to build skyscrapers).<p>In some cases (some people) it may not actually matter, but in the general case, looks like it does.