Really

There's an interesting (and short) article here at Ed Boyden's MIT blog on the question of real-world, real-time applications of school classwork.

In a nutshell, he says that once you're satisfactorily grounded in the theoretical underpinnings of a subject, and you begin to do practical applications of that theory (practical as in 'show me how to use this theory'), you could just as easily be applying those underpinnings toward the resolution of real problems -- things that you'd be doing if you were out of school and in the real world. The benefit is twofold: you see what it would be like to do this for real, and, every so often, your naive (in a good way) approach to problem resolution will come up with insights not available to those who do it for a living.

Its an interesting article.