Wilde isn't dismissing formal learning—he's making a subtler claim about the difference between information transfer and genuine understanding. A teacher can explain photosynthesis or Hamlet's madness, but you only truly *know* these things when you've wrestled with them yourself, arrived at your own confusions and clarities. A music student might memorize every rule of counterpoint and still produce lifeless compositions until the moment something clicks in their own ear. The quote matters because it rescues education from the tyranny of mere credential-gathering and reminds us that the most valuable knowledge—how to think, what matters, who you are—arrives through personal struggle, not transmission.