Few myths resist experience more than the value of formal education.
The briefest overview of human thought shows how little schooling has to do genius. Pythagoras, Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein each leaped far beyond the horizon, and each did so largely alone. Academia snuggled up to Einstein after his breakthroughs, and published his finding, but Einstein was a Swiss Patent Office clerk without a diploma when he made those breakthroughs. They did not just tinker with machines. Franklin gave us lending libraries, and Carnegie spread those libraries across a continent.