What is the difference between educated and talented?

Your question presupposes a difference so I’ll entertain it. Let’s talk talent first:

Buddy Rich. He was a jazz drummer who never took any lessons; however, Rich grew up in Vaudeville theaters and so he got a first class education in that he was able to watch and listen to a variety of pit drummers. Rich said in one interview that he was really good at learning by watching others.

Filippino Lippi. He began his career as an assistant to Botticelli, but later he became a great artist in his own right. Lippi, like Rich, never attended school for his art, but he was a fast learner and a quick study. He got so good at mimicking Botticelli's style that the maestro would give his commissions to Lippi to work on and then add in the finishing touches. Today, Lippi has been recognized as one of the “most modern of the Renaissance artists.” Lippi, too, excelled at watching others—excelled in the sense that he could completely mimic what he saw.

Let’s separate the talented from the educated:

The talented learn by watching and doing—as do all of us, including the educated—but they then go on to improve on what they have seen whereas the educated can only continue to copy. Great art is all about transgressing rather than transcribing. There are some great scholars who have likewise transgressed and created new schools of thought that the more mundane now swim within. The talented push whereas the educated plod. There’s nothing wrong with plodding—without that work we would not have a civilization—but civilization (or culture or whatever you want to call this thing that happens when humans get together with arts of various kinds) would not advance were it not for those quick studies to took things off into new directions.

Let’s go further and separate the talented from the changers of society:

As I write this I realize that I’m not merely separating the educated from the talented, but the merely talented from the iconoclast, the changers of society. I think that there are many talented people that are also educated, but there are very few iconoclasts within that number. The talented are really good at mimicking what they see, but that doesn’t mean that that’s all that can be done. After all, the educated can also mimic quite well—one does through some innate ability and the other does so through slightly different channels. The talented are not in a class by themselves as talent is not a static thing nor is being educated (when you really advance into education you begin to understand that you will never truly know everything there is to know, which is I suppose one reason why our society pushes people to specialize rather than generalize). Each member of these “groups” is striving in some way—or at least they did until they didn’t. But the truly talented possess the right combination of skill, luck, and being born at the right time and in the right place. The truly educated are merely the administrators of society. It’s not a put down; how would Theodoric the Great, a barbarian Ostrogoth, have ruled Rome so well on its way down into obscurity without the Roman aristocrats tediously administering his government? Answer: He’d have gotten nowhere and we know this because after Theodoric’s death the seemingly brilliant golden boy of his time, Byzantine emperor Justinian (also “the Great”) destroyed what was left of the Roman bureaucracy and down went the Western side of the Roman Empire. Justinian also brought down the Eastern Empire too when he introduced exciting new innovations into an ossified system of government. Talent has its limits, I suppose.

The truly talented could not have flourished as they did had it not been for the educated taking care of business (for every Alexander the Great there is an Aristotle and while these two men may have been talented indeed, we should not forget that they were able to do what they did because of the unseen educated administrators taking care of business).

It seems that there is a symbiotic relationship at work here and so dividing these two groups isn’t as productive a project as it may seem, unless you are just looking for bragging rights for being labeled talented.