Technically could you do the electrician school, skip the apprenticeship and just work on your house? How important is it to learning the typical things you'd see on a standard house?
The work I did was more code-compliant than work I've seen in other houses done by so-called "licensed" electricians. Possibly because I took the code literally and assumed compliance was non-optional.
It will make more sense when you realize the trades were basically designed to suppress the 'out-group' from joining the union or being hired to keep up the union workers wages. That's why hiring an EE is so much cheaper than hiring an electrician.
That is, the dirty secret is: the trades have a vested interest in having 'shortage.'