Tips for a first time Scholar?

[Sida]

How "required" would you say Swiftcast and Stoneskin are? Would I be negligent to ignore them until I get closer to 50, or are they fairly "required" would you say?

While Swiftcast can be used for all sorts of emergency casting, it really shines when you need to battle resurrect people. And as a healer, in later content, you will need to battle resurrect people. So yeah, it's not awfully bad if you won't get to it before later levels but that's just postponing it.