Informal educational space
Introduction
Non-formal education (NFE) refers to all those activities that are carried out outside the school environment, outside the structure of the school system, also seeking to develop intellectual and moral competencies of individuals. "Non-formal education" is understood as the set of specific and differentially designed processes, means and institutions, based on explicit training or instruction objectives, which are not directly aimed at the provision of the grades of the regulated educational system."[1].
Non-formal education is a type of education that will include all the processes and practices that involve a heterogeneous social group, but whose institutional structure does not certify for school cycles, that is, it has an educational intention and a planning of the teaching-learning process, only that this will occur outside the school environment.
One of the main differences with formal education is that the activities included in non-formal education are generally independent of each other, although some may be members of other broader development systems (industrial, health). In some other cases, they may also be linked to the formal education system such as some adult programs. Other clear differences are their institutional measures, their educational objectives, their sponsorship, and the groups they serve.
We can also find similarities between the two, for example, both non-formal and formal education have been organized to increase and improve the informal learning process and, on some occasions, their methods are also very similar.[2].
Background
The term non-formal education was coined to break with the idea that education could only occur in formal education systems and that it was only "given in the first stages of life and ending in youth."[3] Likewise, it emerged to satisfy the demand that society makes for education. During the sixties, an educational analysis detected what at that time was called "global education crisis", a crisis that especially occurred in formal educational systems (schools). The formal educational systems continued to be maintained under the same conventional means, institutions and principles with which they had been functioning until now and were hardly able to satisfy the educational demand that society itself made. The school was beginning to be severely questioned, but at the end of the sixties it began to see the light when criticism was directed globally at the Institution. The combination of these criticisms meant that trust in said Institution, which became a panacea, was increasingly less.