I once read something to this effect from Oded Goldreich's book (his book on Computational Complexity): Knowledge is the result of hard computation on publicly

I once read something to this effect from Oded Goldreich's book (his book on Computational Complexity): Knowledge is the result of hard computation on publicly available information. I think getting a formal education definitely aids the process of learning. Otherwise how do you get around Meno's paradox (i.e. how do you enquire about something if you don't know of its existence?) ? And self-taught programmers definitely would benefit from some structure in their education (again - the structure is decided by a formal CS curriculum). I have been trying to learn signal processing over the last couple of years and I found that OCW + Berkeley webcasts took me a lot farther than random googling about how to accomplish something.