Would this apply to elementary school teachers? Because I really don't see how that's relevant at all. I also know that the type of work that they'd have teachers turn "interns" do would probably be menial tasks that literally require no education, and not what they should be wasting time teaching in classes.

School is the one chance that we get to just teach knowledge for the sake of knowledge; a certain amount of inexperience in established business processes upon entering the workforce will actually breed innovation and entrepreneurial endeavors as menial problems are given a new look. Shifting focus to paper-pushing practicum 101 is going to further diminish America's standing as a leader in business, innovation, and technology.

I work in IT, I'm relatively young. Within the last year our former sysadmins left for greener pastures. They are smart, experienced people who taught me a lot, but were just "doing things the way they've always been done" when it came to processes. Since then, I've managed to rework our processes, pickup new tools (and build some from scratch) that allow us to operate more efficiently as a department. We currently are at half the staff that we were when I started, and we've reduced our average turnaround time on requests, and have a greater scope of responsibility as a department. This is not the result of me "learning how today's businesses currently operate" but having learned fundamentals about technology in college, and from my own personal experimentation in a purely theoretical environment, coming into a business and saying "why the F- are we doing it like this!?"