On the northside of Indianapolis, there is a senior living community, numbering about 160 residents. Over the past few months, a group of interested residents and I have been meeting weekly for 90 minutes, devoting our attention to the discussion of a great book. There is no course title, and the offering does not appear in any course catalog. No money changes hands. No credit is awarded. No one is making progress toward a degree or advancing a career, and no lines are getting added to a resume or CV. There is no reason for anyone to attend the sessions except for the desire to share in the pursuit of knowledge.

The comments of some of the 20 or so regular participants are telling. Said one woman, “Many fine activities are planned for residents here each day, but after a while, the day trips, board games, movies, and art projects leave you feeling like you are back in kindergarten.” This sentiment may betray a mistaken assumption on the part of the organizations operating such communities—namely, that aged people need nothing so much as ways to keep occupied, pass the time, and stay amused. Said another, “It is such a treat to gather like this and talk about great books and great ideas. It makes us feel as though society has not given up on us, that developing our minds still matters.”

When Americans think about “students,” this is not what they call to mind. Our institutions of education, which together comprise a $1.5 trillion industry, cater almost exclusively to the young. Whether K-12 schools, vocational and career training centers, or colleges and universities, the US educational apparatus is heavily inclined to those under the age of 30. This reflects a longstanding presumption that education should be focused on preparation, teaching students fundamentals such as reading and math, prepping them for entry into the job market and a lifetime of gainful employment, and paying income taxes. There are obvious economic returns on this investment.

Yet education and youth are not necessarily linked, and participants in this group are truly students in the fullest sense. The word student comes from the Latin studere, meaning to apply oneself zealously, an activity for the old, thanks to a lifetime of focus and application, who are often better prepared than the young. What might from one perspective appear to be a bug of aging—a diminished capacity for multitasking—might from the standpoint of focus and concentration prove to be a feature. Both Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House on the Prairie and Frank McCourt of Angela’s Ashes began writing at the age of 65, and Grandma Moses did not even take up painting until she was 77 years old.

Sometimes education achieves its highest goals when it is largely divorced from utilitarian considerations. Consider Socrates. A stonecutter by trade, he seems to have devoted most of his days to teaching students pro bono, without payment. Although many of his well-off interlocutors would have been happy to pay, just as they were quite prepared to bribe his jailers to rescue him from imprisonment and execution, Socrates would have none of it. To accept payment would have implied that he had no true calling as an educator—that he, like the sophists whom he so reviled, was merely teaching to make money, subordinating the pursuit of wisdom to the appetite for wealth. From the Socratic perspective, selling knowledge or virtue for money represents a subversion of values far more invidious than prostitution.

A great deal hinges on what we take to be the purpose of human life. If we are here to make money and pursue education to boost earning power, then a powerful case can be made for prioritizing studies that will pay off in purely pecuniary terms. But perhaps education also has higher and better purposes. Suppose, for example, that it can help to fulfill the most essential feature of human nature, as indicated in the first line of Aristotle’s “First Philosophy”—the desire to know. If what comes most naturally to us is the pursuit of understanding, then education will be worth pursuing for its own sake, not merely as a means to something else, and learning will remain a priority for us so long as we remain alive.

If the world were constructed according to utilitarian principles, perhaps only the young would be educated, and once educated, they would stop learning and start producing. But if utility is not the central organizing principle, then human destiny may be as much or more fulfilled when we understand and marvel at an idea as when we exploit it for some other purpose, such as boosting economic productivity. Regarding the role of humans in the greater scheme of things, perhaps it is not so important whether we live with the knowledge of something for 50 years or just 5 minutes, so long as, in the moment, we recognize and understand it for what it really is.

These non-utilitarian goods seem especially precious to the participants in my group. The book we have been discussing lately is Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” and we are devoting a weekly session to each of its eight parts. Recently we focused on the topic of marriage. The students in my university courses, who average about 25 years of age, always glean insights from Tolstoy. But with the senior group, which includes participants whose marriages have lasted as long as 68 years, 67 years, and 64 years, the discussion takes on quite a different tenor. Unlike younger students, they can draw on a lifetime of experience that includes the death of their parents, their entire careers, and parenthood and grandparenthood. Ideas arise that are absent with younger students who are just getting started in life.

Said one participant, “Our reading and discussion of this book is enriching our lives in so many ways. It provokes us to think about our careers, our families, and our communities in ways nothing else around here does. In some instances, we revisit unpleasant parts of our lives, and tears of shame and regret are shed. But more often, it brings us back in touch with things in life that have meant the most to us, and we are so grateful for the chance to reconnect with them and savor them again.” It is as though the novel were opening up long-forgotten ideas and experiences and bringing them, and the participants who encounter them, back to life. Each week, for 90 minutes, we are revitalizing one another.

I am not suggesting that seniors should return to full-time, degree-earning studies, although there is also no reason they shouldn’t. But what we have discovered is that even very senior human beings often exhibit a deep longing to know, a delight in discussing ideas, and a passion to share in the life of the mind for its own sake. They may not be able to run as fast or jump as far as when they were young, but they can inquire, discover, ponder, and rejoice in learning at least as deeply and in some ways even more richly than in their youth. We are learning that liberal education, while not wasted on the young, should be expanded where possible to include those at life’s other pole.