A culture rooted in φιλοσοφία (greek, philosophia in Latin). So yes, I meant that literally. There were times, already 2500 years ago, where people wanted to study to become wiser.
It's great when you're a wealthy noble and have time to do luxury things.
For almost all of history, higher education has been a luxury good for the rich, including the Greek city states. There have been a few exceptions, most notably European countries with tax funded schools, but even those are primarily pumping out degrees used for chasing jobs.
The point of modernity was to broaden access and opportunity for everyone, not just the rich.
What we got instead was a regression to aristocracy, where critical social resources of all kinds were enclosed and captured by capital and financialisation.
The result is a lot of very broken systems, education being just one.
Universities became primarily about administration of property and income, and the educational element has become a form of marketing to attract money (and bodies) so the rest could function.
And now we're on the edge of the next stage, which isn't "What is education for?" but "What are humans for?"
We used to know. Or at least we used to believe we knew.
I'll throw my two cents in, this still exists today. The difference between now and then is that now a college degree is seen as a requirement for a higher quality of life. (And not in a eudaimonia way)
Many people are going to college primarily to make more money in their adult life, the actual learning is secondary. If you're already well-off or just don't care, you can still get the education for its own sake.
The issue is that we've created a perverse incentive to get a college degree.
Oh yeah, I can just imagine a line of people wanting to learn Strength of Materials course for fun, or anything equally crazy (requiring at the same time fresh knowledge of other hard uni courses as a prerequisite, a lot of strict rigor in studying and just pure baseline intellect to get it at all). One can learn Latin for fun, starting from literally zero and stop any arbitrary level too. One can't learn ANY hard STEP topic without doing that continuously on a progression. If god forbid you take a gap in studying STEM courses, in a decade you will have to restart from school program again :) .
PS: I get all the idealistic mulling about how universities should be these utopian centers for the voluntary knowledge study and collaboration and the only result should be merit based. But real world doesn't work like that. If a country wants to have professional chemists or say welders for example, it must force kids through a lot of boring and hard mandatory study for years. Humanity didn't invent anything better yet, sorry.