Can you learn data mining in undergraduate or graduate school?

I was recently asked by a former student from one of my data mining courses if a particular program was a good one to learn data mining (it happened to be this one, from NC State). It raises an interesting question: how much can data mining be learned from a book or a course?

Some of the best data miners I have met did not have any statistics course in their past, nor (for some) any higher level mathematics. For my part, I was a computational mathematics major undergrad, and applied math for my masters, but never took a stats course either (though I did take and TA a probability course). That stated, I always recommend in my courses that folks become familiar with basic statistics; one book I have recommended is linked in the book recommendations section--The Cartoon Guide to Statistics. Since I have never taken a college or graduate data mining course, I can't comment directly. My concern is that they are too theoretical (how the algorithms work) rather than practical (how to handle data problems, how to pose proper questions to be addressed by data mining, etc.).

I'm willing to be persuaded though, so if you have experience with good, practical data mining curricula, please let me know.