Despite the importance of education, acquiring degrees and certificates isn’t the end of the road for anyone. In fact, it’s only the beginning from where the person can widen his horizons. Otherwise his development stops.

Education is not just a goal to achieve; it’s a way to acquire knowledge. We can’t basically obtain all information through formal education.

Not every educator or learner is well informed and not every intellectual has relied on education to acquire knowledge.

You don’t have to have a formal degree to be considered educated. There are long queues of the so-called “elitists” with degrees and titles who have contributed nothing of value to their communities.

In the Arab world, there are many examples of educated people who have become prominent intellectual figures without acquiring any degrees or titles.

Foremost among these is Abbas Mahmoud El-Akkad, who wrote more than 100 books on philosophy, poetry, religion and great human beings.

El-Akkad’s knowledge surpasses the education of many highly knowledgeable professors. The Nobel Foundation confirmed the importance of a person’s intellect and not of degrees when it awarded British author Doris Lessing the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Lessing left school at the age of 13, and thereafter was self-educated. She dedicated her literary works to studying relationships between different cultures and civilizations.

Pieced together by a Roman historian from ancient records that are themselves the compilation of different strands of oral testimony, her latest novel, “The Cleft,” is the story of our earliest ancestors, a slow-moving, semi-aquatic race of females.

Doris Lessing wrote literary novels and the majority received both praise and criticism from major British and Western newspapers.

One of her most important works is “The Golden Notebook”, which made her an iconic figure in 1962. What attracted my attention though was that this distinguished author rebelled against her mother and the difficulties of her life. Her mother was so obsessed with extreme cleanliness and education that she drove Lessing to hate education and that’s why she left school.

Lessing managed to create a name among authors by her own efforts to prove to everyone — men and women alike — that an individual could challenge his or her circumstances to become creative.