Many colleges and universities now have courses that teach entrepreneurship—or at least teach about it. A question that has hovered over those courses and remains a strong point of contention is whether it’s really possible to teach entrepreneurship.

Can it be nurtured, or is it just one of those things that either is or is not in a person’s nature?

That was debated in a recent Wall Street Journal article, where two men with some “street cred” squared off. Noam Wasserman, who teaches entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School argued that it can be taught. Victor Hwang, who manages a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, argued that it can’t.

Wasserman maintains that entrepreneurship can be taught, just as management techniques can be taught to MBA students. In his view, future entrepreneurs can benefit greatly from coursework by learning to avoid common hazards that doom quite a few startup companies.

Such as?

Wasserman writes, “with the passion and confidence they feel early in a venture, entrepreneurs often dramatically underestimate the resources and time that it will take to put everything in place.”

That’s no doubt true, but do you need a course at Harvard to grasp the importance of making a realistic assessment of the time and resources that a startup company is likely to require?

Wasserman says that the pitfalls are predictable and avoidable, so teaching would-be entrepreneurs about them will mean fewer failures. Is it possible, however, that by emphasizing the things that can go wrong (and would it ever be possible to cover all of the unknowns?), we would get fewer mistakes but also fewer entrepreneurs?

In his half of the argument, Victor Hwang made that point. “Telling entrepreneurs,” he wrote, “to avoid failure risks causing them harm. They’re tempted to fall into endless planning and product engineering, without real-world experimentation.”

Hwang maintains that the skills needed for entrepreneurship can’t be taught. “For an entrepreneur, there are rarely clear-cut right or wrong decisions day to day. Real life gives entrepreneurs the ability to better make those kinds of judgment calls.” He thinks that entrepreneurship is like surfing—it can’t be learned in a classroom, but only while you’re actually on a board in the ocean.

Among the most important skills an entrepreneur needs, Hwang writes, is the ability to work with others, “to get them to surmount their barriers and deliver their best efforts.” And that’s after talking someone into signing on with a startup, which will rarely be an easy sell because there are usually a lot of safer, more comfortable options than joining a brand new company. Those essential people skills, Hwang observes, can’t be developed in the classroom.

Wasserman doesn’t think that entrepreneurship can be taught entirely in the classroom and Hwang isn’t opposed to programs designed to assist entrepreneurs. Nor is Wasserman opposed to allowing people to give entrepreneurship a try without first taking some courses (let’s hope we never get to the point where Americans will have to go to college and get a certificate before being allowed to start a company), while Hwang isn’t calling for the abolition of entrepreneurship courses.

The debate is over the gray area. Will the country get more entrepreneurship if people first take some courses or if they, as the Nike ad says, “Just Do It”?

We can’t run an experiment to find out. We know that some famous entrepreneurs succeeded without so much as a college degree, much less business school courses instructing them in what to do and not to do. Presumably some of Professor Wasserman’s students benefited from his teaching and became successful entrepreneurs.

On the flip side, it’s possible that some entrepreneurial plans crashed and burned because the person behind them simply didn’t have enough information; it’s also possible that some people who had been thinking of entrepreneurship took courses in it and were either scared away or lost their drive while studying about it.

One person who has a great deal of knowledge about this is Jeff Sandefer, who created the Acton MBA in Entrepreneurship.

I asked Mr. Sandefer for his views. He responded, agreeing with Wasserman that a good entrepreneurship program can “accelerate the ‘school of hard knocks’ and save some expensive mistakes.” Among the skills that can be taught or honed, he says, are: basics such as sales, operations processes, and finance; experiential learning that “approximates real world judgment”; key writing, speaking, and listening skills.

So, maybe a good entrepreneurship program is similar to the Juilliard School of Music for highly talented musicians. Just as a school like Juilliard can polish a talented young musician and possibly get him on the way to a fantastic career, so can entrepreneurship programs polish a prospective entrepreneur and increase the likelihood that he will succeed.

Sandefer also offered some criticism of classroom entrepreneurship programs, however. For one thing, he doesn’t think that professors who have no actual business experience can teach it. “It’s not a subject that lends itself to ‘top down’ lectures or vague theory,” he writes. Furthermore, he adds, few academics have enough credibility to inspire students to do “the difficult trial and error work it takes to develop sound business judgment.”

One of the best things about our (fairly) free market in higher education is that people can take it or leave it. Schools that think they’re able to teach entrepreneurship try to sell their services. Students who are bright enough to contemplate such careers are presumably also bright enough to evaluate the programs and decide for themselves whether they would be beneficial.

If any readers have experience in this area, please offer your comments!