Here I try to articulate my position on “value”: what values are, how they are formed, and why they matter – even though they don’t exist.

My doctoral project centres around the question of the value of education as perceived by learners. And every time I tell someone this, they furrow their brow, just a little. The reaction means one of two things: either they don’t know what I mean by value, or they know what they mean by value and they can’t see how I’m going to measure it.

And both of these reactions are exactly why I want to ask the question.

I’m taking an anti-realist stance on value – which means I don’t believe value exists independently of human thought. The realist believes there are objective truths to even abstract concepts like morality, beauty and value. Just as the cat and the chair and the laundry rack are objectively here in this room with me, so are the truths that hurting the cat is morally wrong, the chair is charmingly provincial and the laundry rack is a worthy appliance.

Anti-realism, by contrast, is far less comforting, far messier, and acknowledges that each of these three judgements is produced by and exists only within a human mind. Moving quickly past the well-explored territory of moral relativism and beauty in the eye of the beholder, let’s focus on the less familiar domain of value, and that claim about the laundry rack’s worth.

I’ve deliberately chosen a very utilitarian object here. My laundry rack is a simple three-tiered thing. I use it to hang my wet laundry inside when the weather’s cold or wet. It’s not heated or powered, and it folds away when I’m not using it. From my perspective, it’s a worthy thing to have in my home: My wife and I have a small house, so we prefer things that don’t take extra space when they’re not in use. I am also quite lazy, and when the laundry’s hung outside where I can’t see it, I tend to leave it too long til it gets rained on. And I hate to use electricity or gas if I can get by without it. To me, the clothes dryer is valuable.

To a person with a larger house, a more proactive attitude to bringing in dry laundry, or who prioritises saving time more than saving energy, its value would obviously be different. (And perhaps I will be that person one day!) Value is variable, dependent, negotiated, and it is produced by a combination of the rational (e.g., the logic of saving space) and the affective (feeling good about saving energy). And because of this affective dimension, trying to explain the value of something can only ever produce sympathy in the listener, who cannot feel how I feel about my laundry rack. It will always fall short of complete understanding.

Of course, the laundry rack has only instrumental value. If mine broke, I’d just get a new one. I value it not for what it is but for what it does: it’s a means to an end, which is dry laundry. It’s not in itself special or precious to me, like my childhood teddy bear or my obnoxiously large vocabulary. These sorts of things are intrinsically valuable – their worth resides within them and can’t be substituted for some alternative that performs the same functions (like someone else’s teddy bear, or common synonyms).

So when I say I want to explore the value of education from the perspective of learners, I know I’m asking a pretty nebulous question, but one I am certain is important. Education is increasingly being written about in terms of ROI. Tertiary education funding is allocated largely for the purposes of resourcing the economy with the right types of workers (that is, cultivating a desired stock of human capital). Viewed from the learner’s point of view, is education a fungible commodity like a laundry rack or a refrigerator – useful if it meets certain quality standards, but essentially interchangeable (including for things that are not education but which lead to the same ends)? Do learners believe education’s value should be predefined in terms of its designed outcomes (if you pay what it says on the sticker you get what it says on the tin)? Or do they find value emerges through their experiences of learning?`

It’s obvious, of course, that I don’t buy the marketing. I think claims of education’s economic value are disingenuous at best, downright damaging at worst – not least because the value claims being made by governments and for-profit providers are from the perspective of governments and for-profit providers. The algorithms used to calculate whether education is “worth it” based on projected salaries and career trajectories do not, and cannot, account for the value ecosystems of learners themselves. And so what I hope to do is find out how learners themselves construct the idea of their education’s value.

I hope I’ll be able to do these questions some justice.