The Essential Role of Informal Education in Modern Society

When we think about education, classrooms, textbooks, and degrees come to mind almost instantly. Yet a significant portion of what shapes us as thinking, functioning individuals – our values, social instincts, practical know-how, and ability to adapt – comes from somewhere far less structured. It comes from life itself. Informal education, the learning that happens outside institutional walls through daily experiences, conversations, communities, and self-driven exploration, is not a secondary supplement to schooling. Increasingly, global education bodies recognize it as a cornerstone of how human beings develop and keep pace with a rapidly changing world.

What informal education actually means 🔗

Informal education refers to learning that occurs outside any organized curriculum or institutional setting. It is unplanned, self-directed, and deeply embedded in everyday life. According to UNESCO’s lifelong learning framework, informal learning is “not institutionalized” and happens “on a self-directed, family-directed, community or socially directed basis.” This sets it apart from both formal education, which leads to recognized qualifications, and non-formal education, which is structured but not necessarily credential-bearing.

In practical terms, informal education takes place when a child learns empathy by watching how family members treat each other, when a professional picks up a new skill by observing a colleague, or when someone teaches themselves video editing through online tutorials. The learning is real, often deeply retained, and directly applicable – yet there’s no syllabus guiding it.

Why the world is paying more attention to informal education 🔗

For much of the 20th century, education policy focused almost entirely on formal schooling. That has shifted considerably. UNESCO now recognizes that people “can no longer navigate their life course using only the skills and knowledge acquired at school, college or university.” This acknowledgment has pushed informal education from the margins to the center of global education discourse.

The landmark Belém Framework for Action, adopted by 144 UNESCO Member State delegations in 2009, explicitly mandated UNESCO to develop guidelines to recognize and validate all learning outcomes, including those acquired through non-formal and informal learning. This was a pivotal moment – it signaled that international education policy could no longer treat informal learning as invisible or inconsequential.

Following this, UNESCO developed its Guidelines for the Recognition, Validation and Accreditation (RVA) of Non-formal and Informal Learning, a framework that asks governments to build systems which make informally acquired skills visible, valued, and usable – in education pathways, in the labor market, and in society more broadly.

Informal education and the lifelong learning imperative 🔗

UNESCO’s definition of lifelong learning rests on a core idea: learning must span all ages, all life contexts – family, school, community, workplace – and all modalities, including informal ones. Schools are described as just one part of a wider “learning universe” that includes families, communities, workplaces, libraries, museums, and digital platforms. Informal education is the thread connecting all of these spaces.

This isn’t merely idealistic language. A recent OECD analysis on informal learning notes that informal learning “accounts for the majority of time individuals spend learning” and is closely associated with skills development, yet it “remains insufficiently recognised in many policy frameworks.” The gap between how much people actually learn informally and how little policy systems acknowledge it is one of the defining challenges of modern education.

OECD data on adult learning trends show that on average across member countries, more than nine in ten employed adults report learning new things at work at least occasionally – much of it through observation, peer interaction, and on-the-job problem-solving. These are not structured training programs. They are informal learning in action.

How informal education supports personal development 🔗

One of the strongest arguments for valuing informal education is its direct contribution to personal growth. Unlike formal education, which is standardized around fixed curricula and uniform outcomes, informal education allows individuals to follow their own interests, build at their own pace, and develop competencies that are directly relevant to their lives. This includes communication skills, empathy, leadership, resilience, and moral reasoning – traits that are difficult to teach through textbooks but naturally developed through lived experience.

The UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning has noted that “a great deal of individuals’ and groups’ most important learning takes place in non-formal and informal contexts – through the workplace, civil society, the mass media, cultural settings, family and friends.” This is a significant statement. It positions informal learning not as a fallback, but as the primary site of meaningful human development.

Social skills are a clear example. From earliest childhood, interactions within families and peer groups are where people learn to communicate, listen, cooperate, and manage conflict. These capacities underpin every professional and personal relationship throughout life. They rarely appear in a formal school curriculum, yet they are foundational to functioning in society.

Self-direction and intrinsic motivation 🔗

A key characteristic that makes informal learning particularly effective is its alignment with intrinsic motivation. OECD research highlights that informal learning enables adults to take ownership of their learning pathways, driven by curiosity and personal relevance rather than external requirements. When a person chooses to learn something because it matters to them – not because it will appear on an exam – the learning tends to be deeper, more durable, and more readily applied.

This self-directedness also builds what researchers and educators call a “learning habit” – a disposition to keep seeking knowledge throughout life. In an era of AI and rapid technological change, this orientation toward continuous learning may be one of the most important outcomes any education system can foster.

Adapting to change: where informal education proves essential 🔗

Modern economies are in a state of constant disruption. Digitalization, automation, climate change, and shifting labor markets are rewriting what skills matter and how quickly they need to be updated. As the OECD notes, adapting to these changes “through upskilling and reskilling, is crucial for adults to reap the benefits of the ongoing transformations.” Formal education systems, built on multi-year curricula and institutional timelines, are structurally ill-suited to this pace of change. Informal learning fills that gap.

Recent OECD research found that problem-solving skills – among the most in-demand capacities in the age of AI – improve primarily through informal adult learning in the workplace. This is not a minor footnote. It suggests that formal training programs, however well-designed, cannot replicate the adaptive learning that happens through real work experience, peer interaction, and on-the-job problem-solving.

The COVID-19 pandemic offered a striking demonstration of this. As employment conditions shifted overnight, millions of workers turned to self-directed online learning, community knowledge-sharing, and peer mentoring to develop new competencies. This was informal learning at scale, driven not by institutional design but by necessity and individual initiative.

Workplace learning as informal education 🔗

The workplace is one of the most productive environments for informal learning. Learning from colleagues, adapting to new systems through trial and error, receiving feedback during tasks, and mentoring relationships are all forms of informal education. OECD data show that while formal and non-formal learning are valuable, they cannot fully substitute for the experiential learning that “helps adults apply and reinforce skills in real-world settings.” Policies that promote mentoring, job rotation, and continuous learning cultures in workplaces are therefore extensions of an informal education agenda.

Recognition of informal learning: closing the policy gap 🔗

One of the most significant recent developments in global education policy is the push to formally recognize skills acquired through informal means. The UNESCO RVA framework, adopted by member states, asks countries to create mechanisms that make informally learned competencies visible and officially valued. According to the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, recognition and accreditation of informal learning outcomes “gives individuals an incentive to continue to learn, empowers them and enables them to become more active in the labour market and in society.” For disadvantaged groups particularly, RVA can help level the playing field in education and employment.

The OECD has similarly developed the concept of Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL), which allows individuals to validate skills and knowledge acquired through work experience, non-formal and informal learning, reducing the time and cost of gaining formal qualifications. This is particularly important for adults who have accumulated considerable real-world expertise but lack credentials to show for it.

The alignment of these efforts with Sustainable Development Goal 4 – which calls on all countries to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” – gives the recognition of informal learning a global mandate, not just an academic recommendation.

Informal education, social inclusion, and equity 🔗

Beyond personal development and workforce readiness, informal education has a critical equity dimension. For communities where access to formal schooling is limited – whether due to geography, economics, disability, or social exclusion – informal learning is often the primary pathway through which knowledge, values, and practical skills are transmitted. UNESCO data show that in one-third of countries worldwide, fewer than 1% of adults participate in formal or non-formal education programs. For these populations, informal learning is not a supplement; it is the main channel of education.

Cultural transmission, civic identity, and intergenerational knowledge – all of which hold communities together – flow through informal learning channels. Attending community events, participating in festivals, absorbing family history, and engaging in volunteer work are all forms of informal education that build social cohesion and civic responsibility. These outcomes are rarely measurable by examination, but they are no less real for that.

Informal education and the digital age 🔗

Digital technology has dramatically expanded the reach and depth of informal learning. Online platforms, video tutorials, podcasts, forums, and social learning communities have put an extraordinary range of knowledge within reach of anyone with internet access. According to one analysis, the growth of online platforms has enabled more than half the global population to engage in some form of informal education, creating a structural shift in how learning is accessed and valued.

This shift has also created new challenges for formal education systems. When a student can learn data science from a YouTube channel, a language from an app, or design skills from a community of online creators, the traditional classroom can no longer claim a monopoly on meaningful learning. The response – increasingly embraced by policy frameworks – is not to resist this reality but to integrate it, by building bridges between informal digital learning and formal recognition systems.

The UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning explicitly acknowledges that in the age of digital technology and AI, the learning ecosystem is “interconnected, employing both online and offline resources to enable learning to take place anywhere, anytime, via individualized pathways.” This is, in essence, a description of informal learning as a permanent feature of the modern education landscape.

Why formal education alone is not enough 🔗

None of this is an argument against formal education. Schools and universities remain essential – they provide structured knowledge, critical frameworks, socialization, and recognized credentials that open doors. But formal education, by design, is bounded. It operates within fixed timeframes, standardized content, and institutional constraints that make it inherently slow to adapt.

The OECD Skills Outlook makes the case clearly: lifelong learning must involve “informal and non-formal learning such as learning from co-workers and workplace training, and unintentional learning derived from spontaneous social interactions.” A learning system that counts only formal education is measuring only part of the picture – and likely the smaller part, given how much of human skill and character formation happens outside institutional settings.

The need for informal education is, at its core, a recognition that life is the most comprehensive curriculum available. The skills that sustain people through uncertainty, change, and complexity – adaptability, social intelligence, self-directed inquiry, moral reasoning – are learned by living, not only by studying. Acknowledging this is not a retreat from academic rigor; it is an expansion of what education is understood to be.

What do you think? Given how much learning happens outside classrooms throughout a person’s life, should formal education systems be redesigned to more actively build on what students already know from their informal experiences? And in a world where AI and automation are constantly changing skill requirements, do you think informal learning will become more important than formal credentials for professional success?

References

1. https://lifelonglearning-toolkit.uil.unesco.org/en/node/177
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12. https://www.uil.unesco.org/en/lifelong-learning/recognition-validation-accreditation
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14. https://educorpus.com/importance-of-informal-education/
15. https://www.uil.unesco.org/en
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