Yes, education teaches you things, important things, that likely you will not know otherwise. For example, I studied Chinese history and culture with some of the world's leading experts; I'm confident that I know much more about it than people who spent the same time learning Java. And because I know those things, I have a much better understanding of everything I read about China and also about my own country's history and culture, because I can see it context of what people in other countries do.

Another thing education teaches you is how to reason effectively, the most important skill of all: Reason is what separates people from animals, the Enlightenment from the Dark Ages, science from superstition, rationality from hokum. And almost the first thing you learn is intellectual humility: I am wrong about so much, and others know so much that I don't and have such different experience, that it's foolish to dismiss them. You learn we are each prisoners of our own narrow perspectives and experiences, and that the more challenging another point of view is, the more likely it is to be worth listening to. So when you say you "laugh" at my ideas, I think you should have spent less time on Java and more on learning.