[delusional]

> I think Waterloo’s mix of school and working is a pretty solid way to tackle this.

We dont disagree at all here. I attended a university that did project based learning, where each semester was organized around a single semester long group project. That worked wonderfully well for me, and I enjoyed the more freeform learning environment immensly. Those connections you describe is exactly what I could feel forming as I tried to apply what I learned to my project.

There's plenty of room too for what we call "profession schools" that do placement in the workforce. I don't think that fits everyone, but it's not a "worse" kind of schooling at all, and some people really like it. It's honestly quite difficult to accomodate on the workplace side, but if structured well, it's great.

I'm not against post teens/20s education either. I'm honestly for all kinds of education.

[ericd]

Ah yeah, another good method. We had some project-based labs, and those were definitely some of the most impactful classes for me. But those still tended to be somewhat "synthetic" projects, and we'd never really used even basic professional tools like SQL. I definitely would've had more motivation to spend more time learning about databases, for example, query planner, how to build, etc.