Informal education: what it is, characteristics, advantages and disadvantages

Education is a fundamental pillar because it is one of the factors that has the greatest influence on the progress and advancement of people and, therefore, of different cultures and societies. In addition to enriching culture and promoting knowledge, it also promotes a series of values. For all this and much more, education is very necessary.

We can find different types of education: formal, non-formal and informal, the latter being the one we are going to focus on. Informal education would be that which takes place outside all types of traditional educational institutions and would be a alternative that offers the possibility of developing less conventional learning processes than in other types of education.

In this article we will see what informal education consists of and their characteristics.

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The different types of education

Education, as we well know, is the way that people have to transmit our knowledge and this entails a learning process of a series of knowledge and skills. Likewise, education is a type of training that is used for the fundamental purpose of

encourage the growth of the intellectual and moral capacity of people.

As we mentioned before, there are different types of education. In the first place, we can find informal education, which would be the one that takes place without planning. structured and, therefore, is based on everyday life and is carried out in the educational field less formal. In this sense, we could say that this type of education is not the one that would appear within educational institutions nor in the curricular field. On the contrary, this education is developed in places of the social and daily sphere, being the subject who learns the active part of his own education.

In second place, formal education is one that is carried out in a regulated and planned way, in addition to being developed intentionally. This would be the most common education that we can find, since it is the one that normally develops within compulsory education institutions, from preschool until the end of education studies secondary.

Lastly, we can find non-formal education, which is that which is developed in a planned and intentional way, but outside the scope of compulsory education. In other words, non-formal education would be that which is taught in adult training centers where all types of courses and would also be that type of teaching of activities related to sports and leisure, among others.

We could say then that the great difference between formal and non-formal education is that the latter is developed in the context extracurricular, being a type of education that is not completely institutionalized as if it is formal education, which is also the one that It is controlled by the government of each country and is the one that all children must receive until they reach a certain age. determined (eg. For example, in Spain, education would be compulsory, which is formal; by law all children must receive it and cannot leave it until they are at least 16 years old).

Now that we have briefly seen what the different types of education consist of, which are included in 3 large categories, different modes of teaching that we can find we are going to proceed to explain in greater detail what education consists of informal.

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What is informal education?

Informal education would be one that takes place in non-formal educational settings and without such structured planning as in formal education. Also, takes place outside all types of traditional educational institutions, noting that informal education is legal in some countries. However, it is important to point out that one should not necessarily opt for formal education only or informal, but both can occur jointly and complement each other in such a way that this entails great enrichment at the level of learning very important.

Moreover, we could say that all of us who have received a formal education throughout our childhood and adolescence in the school and high school, we have also taken advantage of and continue to take advantage of throughout our lives the learning that we have been developing thanks to different forms of informal education, such as some examples that we will see more ahead.

Likewise, we could say that within informal education we could include any type of learning that takes place outside the regulated school context and that supposes an acquisition of new knowledge, thanks to the active participation of the subject (eg. e.g., showing interest in reading books that you are passionate about and reading on your own, participating in all kinds of cultural activities, etc.). Furthermore, informal education enables the development of habits and the acquisition of skills, values ​​and enriching experiences outside the school context.

This type of education brings with it a wide variety of forms of educating and teaching alternative knowledge, such as the following: education at home, outside the government-regulated educational institutions, so that training is usually carried out in the home environment, although sometimes it also includes teaching in places within nature such as the mountains or even in places in the area where one resides, such as centers in the neighborhood itself that have been created for the purpose of teaching.

On the other hand, within informal education, educators, whether they work for pay or not, teach classes for a wide diversity of students and groups, being able to develop through community, social plans, institutions or foundations of different nature. Here we can find some examples, such as the spontaneous learning of some skill, learning the value of money that is used in the country in which it is resides, the self-taught learning of a series of knowledge through library books or by reading articles from divulgation.

Today we could also include within formal education that learning that the Internet provides us through different blogs or popular digital magazines, such as through this digital magazine on psychology and related branches in which we we find, as well as through videos that we can find on the net and in which a series of knowledge is disclosed and found on the net, as well as also through reading magazines, newspapers and/or books on their own, visits to museums, cinemas, theaters and even through the viewing of documentaries, etc.

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Advantages and disadvantages of informal education

Before concluding this article and after having seen in a little more detail what the informal education, it is time to expose what are the advantages and disadvantages of education informal.

1. Advantages of informal education

Among the advantages of informal education we will begin by saying that it is a more natural and even more practical way of learning sometimes, as it is a way to learn anytime, anywhere from their day-to-day experiences. This way of teaching does not stop, since even on vacation it can be used to teach new things to children going to places with nature where they can learn or visiting places that allow enrichment at the cultural.

Likewise, informal education implies a series of activities such as personal research on a topic that has aroused some interest and this leads to use of books, search for popular articles on the subject, use of different web resources or libraries, visits to places related to the topic of interest, etc.

Another advantage of informal education is that does not require schedules, since it can be learned at any time of the day and also includes a wide variety of learning methods, such as reading videos, teaching by parents, relatives or anyone who is informed about a topic of interest to to learn. Even the internet also gives us a wide variety of possibilities to learn about all kinds of topics that interest us.

In most cases and in a large number of countries, we can acquire a wide variety of knowledge thanks to the available resources. that we have, such as public libraries and museums and, of course, through the Internet, so today, except in exceptional cases and Depending on which country you live in, there are no excuses not to get going when it comes to being curious to learn about different areas of the world. knowledge.

2. Disadvantages of informal education

Although in informal education, if it is not a substitution of formal and/or non-formal education, we can find a wide variety of advantages; however, it is not exempt from having some disadvantages such as the ones that we are going to comment on below.

One of the drawbacks of informal education is that the information that we can obtain through the Internet or some media, including newspapers or magazines, they do not always offer the most truthful information. Moreover, sometimes even this type of media tries to bias the information about a series of topics, as can be the case with political news. On the other hand, information is not always sought from appropriate sources to acquire quality knowledge on a topic of interest.

Among the disadvantages of informal education it is also worth mentioning that we can find that this way of learning is not useful if it is not carried out consistently with some discipline and good habits. And it would be of little use to us if, for example, we start reading a book about a topic that we find interesting if we don't we are constant when reading it and when we want to resume reading we have already forgotten everything we had read previously).

In short, we could say that informal education, if it is complemented in an orderly manner, without one type of education interfering with another, with formal education and even with non-formal education, it can be a very useful education that will give us a series of knowledge of great utility, even opening up a wide range of possibilities by having greater knowledge about areas of knowledge that are relevant to us interesting and to which we would not have had access in the educational center which we attend.