Informal education is a general term for education outside of a standard school environment. It can refer to various forms of alternative education, such as:
- Unschooling or Homeschooling
- Autodidacticism (Self-taught)
- youth Work
Informal educators work in many different settings with individuals and groups who choose to engage with them. The mass media (including television, video games, magazines, etc.), museums, libraries, zoos, after-school and other community-based organizations and cultural institutions offer forms of informal education.
The term 'informal learning' is often used in educational literature as part of a three-way division of education in formal learning, non-formal learning and informal learning., This is the most widely used a particular form of adult education indicate, yet the development of infant to child to adult owes much to informal learning as it does to more formal methods.
The nature of informal learning is diverse and complex. The main points seem to be that informal learning is primarily individualistic in approach, but does not include participation in group activities, mostly non-structured, takes place outside educational institutions dedicated, is not accredited and often have no clear outcome. This can be a broad spectrum of activities and context hide from the acquisition of the necessary skills to survive and adapt in a changing world through hobbies and leisure pursuits for fun, improving to deliberate in a specific field of knowledge with the aim of progress in both employment and social standing.
Coombes and Ahmed (1974) has a comprehensive definition of informal learning as "the lifelong process by which every individual gain and gather knowledge, skills, attitudes and insights from daily experiences and exposure to the environment. Usually it is unorganized, unsystematic and even unintentional at times, but it is responsible for the largest majority of any persons lifetime learning ".
With the growing interest in widening participation and lifelong learning, informal learning gradually accepted as a fundamental, necessary and valuable in its own right '(Coffield 2000) and not merely as a poor alternative to formal learning.
However, the use of the word "informal" in conjunction with the study led to a great deal of debate on the most important elements of this type of education. Smith (1999) believes that the central feature of informal learning is its location. He connects formal learning at schools and training institutions and non-formal learning to community groups and other organizations and therefore allow informal learn all that remains, for example, to cover, interacting with family, friends and work colleagues. Fordham (1979) and Simkins (1977) the extent to which the experience learner-centered, flexible and relevant, while Beinhart and Smith (1998) looked at outcome, the definition of informal learning as "deliberately trying to test your knowledge about anything to improve or teach yourself a skill without taking part in a taught course ".
Eraut (2000), however, cautions against the use of the term informal not, because of his association with the dress or behavior, suggesting that "the colloquial application as a descriptor of learning contexts may have little to do with learning per se . "
