However, it is with the beginnings of religious non-conformity and the work of people such as John Wycliffe that we see a major shift. This they did through preaching, talking with people as they went about their lives, and through more specialized means such as schooling. The church became and remained for many centuries, ‘the greatest educational force in the country’ (Kelly 1970: 1).The clergy had a duty to teach. In Britain, it can be argued that the first adult educators were the missionaries who came from Ireland or from continental Europe. However, it is with the growth of the Christian church that a concern with schooling and with the education of adults gained some significance in Europe. In later years some of these ideas and approaches spreading through, for example, Jewish and Roman education. Philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle began to reflect on the meaning and the process of education. It was later that pedagogy came to be used to describe the art and science of teaching.Īs well as making changes in the form and nature of education, the ancient Greeks also started to build theories about it.
Origin of non formal education how to#
The schoolteacher only taught boys their letters, the pedagogue taught them how to behave. They took the boys to school and sat with them in the classroom as representatives of their fathers. They were family attendants (often slaves) whose duties were to supervise, and be with, the young sons of the house. Pedagogues share some qualities with specialist informal educators. Some centuries later, in Athenian society, there were schools (perhaps based on earlier Babylonian models), and there were both teachers and pedagogues. For example, Achilles had a tutor, Phoenix, who had the task of teaching him to be ‘both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds’ (reported in the ninth book of the Iliad). In ancient Greece we know that people had ‘jobs’ as specialist educators. In tribes this may have been associated with the role of elders. The emergence of specialist informal educators in GreeceĪt some point specialist educators appeared in different communities. We could think of it as learning through participation in the events of daily life. Katerina is teaching her grandchild to respond in kind – and it is an example of the ways people teach and learn while they are engaged with each other in doing other things. A study of everyday cognition in a Greek community, Hillsdale, N. Rosemary Henze (1992) Informal Teaching and Learning. Ah man leave us alone/give us a break over there. Dad is taking you in silly,: why should I go outside, say.Ī. Alexi, your Dad is laughing at you/taking you in. Do you hear you’ll sleep outside tonight, there don’t be afraid. The grandmother, Katerina (K), is helping Alexis (A), aged 4, to be aware of being teased by his father, Thomas (T). What follows is a short exchange during a family lunch in a small Greek village. Parents and others in the village have encouraged, or at the very least permitted, such play.Īs well as play we can also find teaching in many aspects of our daily lives. At one level this learning may seem incidental – but is not accidental. In so doing they learn about how they should act, and what different situations feel like. They are playing – rehearsing conversations and interactions. In this example we can see how the children pick-up on what the behaviour they have seen. We played in the bush like that, pretending we were living there, getting water and eating meat. After we found another animal and killed it, we all carried the meat back: the girls in their karosses, and the boys, hanging it on sticks. On the next hunt, the boys took the girls and we followed along. The girls stayed in the village, and when the boys came back we pretended we were living there and eating – until all the meat was gone. They took some leaves and hung them over a stick, carrying them as though they were strips of meat. The boys pretended they were men, that they were tracking an animal and that they struck it with their poisoned arrows. We entered our huts and stayed there, playing.
Then we ‘married’ and played sexually together. We played at gathering food from the bush, at bringing it back and eating it. We would leave our parents’ village and set up a small, ‘grown-up’ village of our own nearby. For example, this is Nisa, a !Kung woman describing part of her childhood:Īnd that is how we grew up. We can see the process at work in children’s play. One way of thinking about it is as the education of daily living. Informal education has been around as long as people have grouped together. So where did informal education come from? Who are the key thinkers? How does it relate to other ways of describing education? A brief history of thinking about informal education.
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