There is a difference between going to school and being educated. While education is broad and on a worldwide scale, schooling is really rather narrow. Education, according to Wikipedia, is the process of acquiring knowledge or learning through a number of unlimited methods; while schooling, is simply the process of learning or acquiring an education by going to school.
In so many parts of the world today, the need for schooling is highly overemphasized when in actual fact, education is what is most needed. Education has also been known to be a process of bringing about positive changes in the lives of people as well as in their behaviors. It is divided into 3 parts; formal – which is more or less schooling – informal education, and non-formal education.
With the constant rise in the cost of formal education today we should look into the benefits of informal education as a means of learning. Informal and non-formal education is in many ways a more beneficial form of learning because while the formal insists on structure and rules and regulations, the informal and non-formal are less rigid and as such create more room for learning.
Informal Education
Informal education is one that comes from the environment where one finds themselves. It could be at a market, a church or even a party. It is basically a form of education that is natural without boundaries. This form of education is life long, and there is no dishing out of certificates at the end of a term or a semester. What is learned here can be referred to as a life skill. It could range from learning how to cook to learning to shoot a gun.
Non-Formal Education
This is a form of education that has no age restriction. There is no particular age group or grade for any class. Here there is a free learning system targeted at meeting specific learner’s needs. It could be in the form of taking professional training or disciplinary training.
The emphasis here lies on the informal mode of education and how it is better equipped to teach us what we need as opposed to what is required of us to learn. This method is not graded on a general basis like formal education but is dependent on the uniqueness of individuals. Each growing and learning at their own time and pace.
