Courses.
I wanted to be a photographer (pro) from the moment I was about sixteen and realised that my painting/drawing skills were never going to allow me a career as an artist, which had been the original "plan", inasmuch as any callow youth has a plan. Anyway, Vincent, Cézanne and Alberto Vargas had already been invented, so where could I fit and win?
My entrée was via the engineering industry, and I spent maybe six years there learning my craft, much of it in b/w and colour darkrooms. Part of the deal was that I also attend night school towards getting a professional qualification.
Disillusion came early, when the lecturer mocked my comment on admiring David Bailey with the remark that were he to shoot fashion as did Bailey, he'd quit. Instead, I did. I didn't get fired; I suppose I was more valuable to the firm doing what I did for them than I would have been just holding a bit of paper confirming I'd bought into the college philosophy. Vindication came some years later when I'd gone solo and the lecturer's day job in a studio vanished with the times. (The studio for which he worked also ran a colour processing lab, and I derived great pleasure driving up in my increasingly nice wheels and parking outside the glass door right under the collective nose... Not an unworthy revenge, just deep satisfaction that I'd listened to my own music.)
In all my career, not one client asked to see qualifications other then my portfolio (we didn't call 'em books in those days).
I think a long art education is fine if you want to be a historian, a talker and not a doer. What I think art education should be about is NOT mind-setting, but totally about practical skill and technique. Knowledge of your predecessors should be taken as granted, and part of what led you into an interest in art or whatever you call what you do. Neither you (nor the State) should be spending money for you to do what you can do mostly for free in any library.
I have long held the notion that people should never allow their own identity to become subsumed into anyone else's ideal. That's why I think all this critique stuff so dangerous, even when people think they look for it as nothing more than part of a game they are playing. Be very careful: if you allow anyone to fuck with your head, that's how it remains.
Rob C