See Jungle! Go, Darwin, Yeah! City All Over! Go Ape Crazy!

(On the Importance of Formal Education but also the Significance of Self-Learned Knowledge and Skills)

by aLfie vera mella

Even in this age, diploma or certificates could just be formal qualifications. What matters most to some companies and employers are usually the knowledge and expertise on a certain craft which was learned not by going to a formal school but which might have been honed by the individual by years of self-study and practical application thus giving him a legitimate and credible experience and therefore qualifies him to do the task.

Many people who wave their degrees, masters, and even doctorates with obvious arrogance and conceitedness to belittle or derogate their competitors who are armed only with the skills and knowledge learned on their own are actually using such documents to cover up their insecurities and boost up their egos.

Nonetheless, I am not downplaying the importance of formal education. I acknowledge also that having degrees and post-graduation credits are plus factors, but these are not the only measure of an individual's educational worth.

Darwin—I am yet to really read deeper into his life and works—but I would not discredit the guy for apparently not having formal education in the Sciences. His works alone could already compensate for this lack of formal education (if it was indeed true). Not because he was not formally educated that his scientific works could already be derogated and discredited as invalid.

In Simple Words
In this age, it's tough to find a job without documented educational background and with only self-learned skills; however, the point is, having a long list of formal educational training could be an edge but this does not automatically make the person a great performer in a given task or job.

Postscript

The above is my reactionary article to an anti-Darwin commentary that goes...

"Darwin is a theologian not a scientist. If I were led to believe then what is the real qualification of Darwin to even formulate a theory. BTW his evolution is still a theory that means it has not passed itself of any respectability of being a fact and that is after 150 years."

This anti-Darwin commentary above was a comment on an article entitled "The Arrogance of Science and Atheism," written by Joshua Rey.

Charles Robert Darwin, (February 1809–April 1882) was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding.

Darwin published his theory of evolution with compelling evidence in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, overcoming scientific rejection of earlier concepts of transmutation of species. (Source: Wikipedia)