[suigintou]

I'm not gonna get myself too immersed in this topic, but let me just say this from experience: education and talent/skill are not exclusive of one another. Talent/skill may exist in a raw material, but it is tempered (woohoo, blacksmith wordplay!) with education. I may have always had a knack for creative writing, but I had to be taught to use it effectively. Orlando, in Shakespeare's As You Like It, had to be taught to be a lover and a poet by Rosalind because he was uneducated, even though some raw form of a poet and a lover was in him already. And so on and so forth.

Education, thusly, is more valuable to everyone, but not in the same way. For the average person, it will enable them to have a stable future and not be as stupid as they might have been otherwise. For the artistic, the mathematical, the whatever it may be, whom so wishes to be a professional, they cannot get by on talent alone. We are not gods - perfection comes through learnedness.

Of course, both talent and education only go so far. They work best together, not apart, but if one would have to choose one or the other, it would be education.

Basically, I just repeated what is already being said in this thread. Go me. But I used wordplay and mentioned Shakespeare, so I'm cooler.