Education Types

There are various ways how forms of education are commonly subdivided into different types. The most common subdivision is between formal, non-formal, and informal education. However, some theorists only distinguish between formal and informal education. A process of teaching constitutes formal education if it happens in a complex institutionalized framework. Such frameworks are usually chronologically and hierarchically organized as in modern schooling systems, which have different classes based on the student's age and progress, all the way from primary school to university. Because of its scale, formal education is usually controlled and guided by a governmental entity and is normally compulsory up to a certain age. Non-formal and informal education differ from formal education due to their lack of such a governmental institutionalized framework. Non-formal education constitutes a middle ground in the sense that it is also organized, systematic, and carried out with a clear purpose in mind, such as tutoring, fitness classes, or the scouting movement. Informal education, on the other hand, happens in an unsystematic way through daily experiences and exposure to the environment. Unlike formal and non-formal education, there is usually no designated authority figure responsible for teaching. Informal education is present in many different settings and happens throughout one's life, mostly in a spontaneous manner. This is how children usually learn their mother tongue from their parents or when learning how to prepare a certain dish by cooking together. Some accounts tie the difference between the three types mainly to the location where the learning takes place: in school for formal education, in places of the individual's day-to-day routine for informal education, and in other places occasionally visited for non-formal education. It has been argued that the motivation responsible for formal education is predominantly extrinsic, whereas it tends to be mainly intrinsic for non-formal and informal education. The distinction between the three types is normally clear for the paradigmatic cases but there are various intermediate forms of education that do not easily fall into one category.