NON-FORMAL EDUCATION IN PERSPECTIVE

Harbans S. Bhola

DEFINITION DELIVERY OF SERVICES

INSTRUCTIONAL PROCESSES

OBJECTIVES

FORMAL EDUCATION

Institutionalized,graded & hierarchically structured education system.

Through highly formalized institutions w/ established methods,models,instruction & evaluation

Track,grade & certify their graduates for jobs & statuses in the outside world.

Prepare the students for future life.

INFORMAL EDUCATION

Unorganized life-long process by w/c everyone acquires knowledge,skills & attitudes through expeiience & contact w/ others.

Delivered not by formal institutions but by social institutions of family,marriage,peer groups & mass media

The learner is seldom aware of being a student engaged in the integration of new values & skills.

Intergenerational transfer of values,skills & the teaching of cultural norms

NON-FORMAL EDUCATION

Organized & systematic learning activity carried on outside the formal schooling.

Basically out- of- school.

Are often varied and innovative

Respond to utilitarianism & immediacy of needs.

POLICY ISSUES

The intent of all policy-making is essentially to obtain and maintain preferred distribution of power, status and economic goods in a society (Bhola,1975). Education plays an important part in bringing about and maintaining these preferred distributions.

The access to elementary education is limited. Survey shows that the schooling gap is 1/3, the difference between school aged and actual enrolments

THE DISTRIBUTION OF RESOURCES AND SOCIAL

JUSTICE

In an apparent and immediate sense, there is a distributive justice in the promotion of non-formal education. Those who never went to school, can receive some basic education through the non-formal mode of delivery. It also gives justice to the landless, the urban unemployed and untrained, the children of the rural poor, women and can design special programmes for the migrant and immigrant.

ECONOMIC RETURNS

As a consequence, NFE has been claimed to show better economic returns than formal education. It is a salvaging operation to enable school-leavers and drop-outs from the formal school to enter the economy as productive individuals.

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ADVANTAGE

-half of policy-making is projecting a national vision and establishing a national direction. The other half involves harnessing social power for preferred social outcomes(Bhola, 1975). To harness social power means to create organizational mechanisms for the implementation of objectives or delivery of services and institutionalizing them for continuity.

ISSUES ON THE INSTITUTIONALIZING

OF NFE

1. How does NFE be institutionalized?-in other words how can the

delivery system be developed?2. Can the nature, function and

performance of institutions in the social, economic and political sectors be actually changed through non-formal education?

Non-formal education will see a slow but steady expansion in developing countries right into the twenty-first century; it will be with us for a long time since the developmental tasks it must tackle are truly colossal. Over the years, a part of non-formal education will become formalized as alternative formal education (AFE), while another part will continue to serve the special and emergent needs of a learning society in search of cultural enrichment and peace.