Bonnie and I have been sharing some thoughts about the value of formal education as compared to self-education, and we thought we'd open this up to some others' opinions. In another recent thread, I recalled a point made by Pete Townshend (of the Who) in an old interview. In response to the interviewer's question about where he got his musical training, Mr. Townshend crumpled a ball of paper and threw it across the room into a wastebasket. He then said that, in order to be able to do that, he needed to be able to calculate the lift needed to overcome the weight of the paper, the air resistance that the ball of paper would encounter, the arc needed to clear the rim of the wastebasket, and various other physical properties. He said that he didn't actually have formal training in any of these areas, but somehow he had picked up enough knowledge about all of them that he was intuitively able to put the right combination together and accomplish the task at hand.

The example was intended to illustrate that a person might have a lot of musical "education" without having gone through a formal course of study, and I think we would all acknowledge that there are many highly skilled musicians out there who demonstrate this. In my opinion the concept also has merit in non-musical contexts, although I believe our society is reluctant to recognize that people may be educated without that education having been provided or endorsed by a recognized institution of higher learning.

So with that as a long-winded backdrop, what do people think? Can you be "educated" -- musically or otherwise --without the benefit of a formal course of study? Are there types of education that you can only get from formal study? Are there any advantages to self-education over formal education? And should society at large be revising its views of what it means to be educated?