On education, practicality and permeability

Alex Usher has a good article out today on what he calls permeability, referring to the idea that education, practically focused, is best when it is practiced in concert with (not in opposition to) industry or society at large. Usher refers to an example of this as "the applied-research projects that come from local businesses, and are proliferating in place like Ryerson and Canada’s Polytechnics." This is a timely discussion, coming on the heels of the recent Polytechnics Canada conference and just this week the annual conference of the ACCC (now called Colleges and Institutes Canada), both of which focused on how colleges and polytechnics offer an education that is inextricably linked to the socio-economic productivity of Canada.