The trick in flying is to learn from other people's fatal experiences, not your own.
Can education act as a substitute for experience?
Depends on the quality of the education.
1)If your instructor has 'been there, done that'
2)If the course was designed to include real world experience, and with an explicit objective of preparing students for the real world, and with feedback from the real world.
3)If it is conducted with the instructors having the authority to vary the instruction depending on the student(s)
Then yes, I think education can substitute for experience.
There must also be support in the early period of productive work in the real world (mentoring).
Given all of that, you can probably knock from a third to a half of the real world experience off the learning process. You can, of course, knock almost nothing off the physical handling/motor action experience. There is no short cut to kinaesthetic learning (although it doesn't all have to be done with the expensive equipment, e.g. aeroplanes, if you have realistic simulators).
Those three If's are very big if's indeed. and those factors are being reduced massively in almost every field of education, from school on up. Instructors who have done the job for real are expensive, and instructors exercising real judgement and authority are anathema to controlling bureaucracies.
I think it makes sense economically for society, and for large organisations, but it often doesn't make sense for individual departments, schools or programs. As soon as you break budgets down and insist on individual departments saving x percent, the holistic effort collapses. If the boss is aiming at promotion, it's better to save money in your department and pass the degraded student's problems on to the next lot.
Throughout my childhood education, I had teachers who insisted on the highest standards, in a supportive atmosphere, and who were genuine innovators. A large majority had done things in the real world. I was very lucky.
I experienced throughout my time in the RAF what was possibly the last generation of very experienced guys as instructors. A1 QFI Lightning pilots doing my IF2 on the Bulldog. Guys who'd bombed Berlin teaching me night flying, etc. I applied that experience when I became an instructor, and then as a school teacher. I made sure those 3 If's were true. For quite a few years, I had colleagues with the same experience, and the results for our students were stunningly successful, but I often had to lie, cheat and otherwise ignore the increasing bureaucracy which wanted me to teach in a standardised way.
People these days have ever increasing numbers of certificates, with apparently ever higher grades, but the quality of the learning is way down on what it used to be.
For that matter, so is the quality of the experience.