No, all of society (including the most free-market of conservatives) sees value in learning about art, philosophy, history -- in fact every single one of them at some point will have paid to learn about art, philosophy, history etc (even if it's just going to the theatre or buying a book).

The debate from their perspective is simply that you only seem to see value in learning about art in education if someone else pays for it for you, but not enough to pay for it yourself.

The question of "the value of your education" can never win the argument against privatisation/optimisation of education, because the more "value" there is the more the consumer ought to be willing to pay for it.

The reasons for keeping education largely public and unoptimised are outside of that -- avoiding competition on price (richest-student wins), that the lecturers have a by-product that is useful to society (mulling problems where we don't yet know whether they have value or not and the market cannot price them), getting students from multiple backgrounds to bounce off each other (avoid social silo-isation by discipline) etc.

There is no reason to apply economics to education. "Value" is not only monetary. Your post is a prime example of someone who has absorbed the system to an extent that it becomes the very backdrop against which to analyze everything else.

Economics is happy to consider value that is not money.

It's a lot harder to deal with, but it isn't somehow excluded from the purview of economics.

It's probably even necessary to make economic considerations when it comes to education. Given limited resources, choosing to put them towards things that return more value probably makes sense.

Doing something because it provides a higher "return" is exactly the sort of utilitarian thinking this article is arguing against.

You should really try to see this from a non-monetary, non-utilitarian perspective.

I'm not demanding a cost/benefit analysis, I'm simply pointing out that there are real actual resource limitations involved, and that different sorts of education will have different outcomes.

For example, if your desired outcome is self discovery, some education based on indoctrination probably isn't going to work very well. That's a silly example, but choosing between methods and selecting the one that best delivers the result you desire isn't real distinguishable from making an economic choice.

Think of education as an end-in-itself, rather than a utilitarian thing that delivers certain outcomes.

I don't know how to make you stop thinking in a utilitarian way. There are other philosophies, you know?

I'm pretty sure it can't coherently be an end in itself and deliver no value.

I responded to the juxtoposition here: There is no reason to apply economics to education. "Value" is not only monetary.

I'm not insisting that you view education through the lens of economics, I was pointing out that what you said about value was not an argument against economics (because economics doesn't care about what form value takes).

You keep looking for a word other than value to describe this thing that you think should happen because then I can't point out that you can analyze it economically, but this is not a way to argue that education should not be analyzed economically, it is a misunderstanding of economics (it was really clear when stated as "Value" is not only monetary, but "we should do it just because" is still an imputation of value...).

This has turned into a last-word-mine argument, so I'm out.