Toward a redefinition of formal and informal learning: education and the Aboriginal people

Abstract

This paper discusses the way in which formal education is recognized in most countries as an important mechanism of socialization, cultural identity, social control, labour force production, social mobility, political legitimation and stimulation of social change. It also deals with the way state authorized agencies such as the school, college, university and so on are viewed both as the normative exemplar of education, and the only bona fide value structures within which meaningful teaching, learning and education is perceived to occur. This pervasive paradigm of education is seen as the essential institutionalized cultural setting in which formal learning can take place and as the only socially valid setting in which learners can get formally educated. It also posits that, lost in the valorization of this compartimentalization of knowledge, are the histories, biases, beliefs and collectively shared knowledge that organizationally link the individual and group as social extensions of one another