Your post makes me consider what other avenues to achieve the growth of intellectual souls and exposure to depth of thought could exist other than paid-for highly-structured institutions.

I think people wax poetically about their own experiences without really considering the experiences of others. We've had free public libraries for centuries now. We've had a pretty open Internet for decades. There is literally nothing stopping a 20 year old human who lives in Western society from growing their intellectual soul through learning.

For a lot of young kids, school is more like a prison than an intellectual garden. Yet a certain kind of thinking keeps these institutions mandated with the good intention of growing souls.

My own opinion is that the current means is utterly failing at generating the desired ends. As the antiquated expression goes: You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.