This paper explores critically the nature of art's value in education and argues in favor of both intrinsic and instrumental value. Form and expression, while being out of favor in some contemporary circles, are re-claimed as appropriate features of art. Concepts and forms in art as elsewhere serve to structure impressions and experience and selectively shape perception and knowledge, and as such provide a necessary framework for understanding. Drawing on Wittenstein the paper argues that far from being rigid, restricting systems, both language and art are in many ways rough hewn and open-textured and involve a necessary element of indeterminancy. Thus, the idea of limitation through form is itself limited. Fragments must be placed in a suitable historical context and related to a whole to be understood. Form, with its implication of order and relationship (with some looseness of interpretation), is related to understanding, the development of which is a primary educational aim. Artistic understanding includes interpretation but is a more commodious concept in that it incorporates the aesthetic with all its implications of feeling, imagination, and sensibility. Understanding in art implies knowledge and structure, but it is also a holistic, expansive, humane, and experiential concept. Expression is an artist's singular, personal contribution to an artwork and its embodiment shows ideas and feelings shaped through a visual language and sensibility. It is difficult to exclude expression as all art must emerge from an artist's mind and body and as such is valued as giving life to art. The paper, through many artistic examples, discusses the meaning and place of aesthetics, rules, creativity, and responsiveness as well as the social and historical values of art in education and concludes that it is within the contextual complexity of artistic understanding, richly empowering of the self, brought to bear on the realities and qualities of life in visual, aesthetic form that's distinctive educational value is to be found. (Contains 18 notes.)