Livingstone on Formal and Informal Adult Learning
Livingstone on Formal and Informal Adult Learning
Three types (Livingstone, 2001)
- Formal: a teacher with authority has designated learners work through a set curriculum drawn from a pre-established body of knowledge.
- Non-formal (further education): learners choose to study voluntarily with a teacher who supports their own interests, using an organized curriculum.
- Informal: a mentor guides someone in skills without sticking to an organized body of knowledge, in spontaneous everyday situations.
The organizing principle
The teacher-learner relationship, not lifelong-learning policy.
The focus
Adults, including those who missed school as children.
David Livingstone, writing in 2001, described formal, non-formal, and informal learning with adults in mind. Where some frameworks are built around lifelong-learning policy, his turn on one thing: the relationship between the teacher or mentor and the learner.
Formal Education: Authority and a Set Curriculum
In Livingstone’s formal education, a teacher holds the authority to decide that people designated as needing knowledge work through a curriculum drawn from a pre-established body of knowledge. Learners do not choose the content or, often, the class they are placed in. The curriculum is written by others and handed down.
He described this in two forms: the age-graded, bureaucratic school system, where outside authorities set the timetable, the grades, and the subjects; and elders passing traditional bodies of knowledge to the young. Both are teacher-centered.
A teacher with authority delivers a set curriculum to designated learners.
The curriculum is drawn from a pre-established body of knowledge and written by others. This appears either as an age-graded school system or as elders passing traditional knowledge to the young.
Because the learner has little say in formal education, Livingstone marked off a second type where choice returns.
Non-Formal Education: Voluntary and Self-Directed
Livingstone called his second type non-formal or further education. Here learners opt to gain more knowledge or skill by studying voluntarily with a teacher who assists their own self-determined interests, often using an organized curriculum. Adult education courses and skills workshops fit this pattern. Someone who finishes a degree and then decides they need communication or leadership skills finds a teacher to help with exactly that.
The learner sets the direction, and the teacher supports it. Skills of this kind are learned by practice, not by reading about them, so the arrangement leans on doing.
Adult literacy centers fit here too. What each one teaches differs, so how far a learner gets depends partly on the center and partly on how well the learner uses it.
Informal Education: Guidance Without a Fixed Curriculum
In Livingstone’s third type, a teacher or mentor takes responsibility for instructing someone without sustained reference to an intentionally organized body of knowledge. It shows up in spontaneous, everyday situations: guiding someone in job skills or in community work. How to answer interview questions or write a CV is rarely taught in formal or non-formal settings, yet a willing mentor can pass it on.
Livingstone defined informal learning broadly as any activity that pursues understanding, knowledge, or skill without externally imposed curricular criteria, outside the set curricula of educational institutions. By that definition it can happen on the school grounds themselves, in how students play team games, share, and treat one another.
There is no organized body of knowledge to work through.
A mentor guides someone in skills as situations arise, without a fixed curriculum, in incidental settings such as job training or community activities. The goal is the skill itself, not a certificate.
All three types were sorted by a single idea that sets Livingstone apart from other frameworks.
The Organizing Principle: The Teacher-Learner Relationship
The European Commission’s definitions are organized around lifelong-learning policy. Livingstone’s are organized around the relationship between the teacher or mentor and the learner. That relationship is what changes across his three types: who holds authority, who sets the direction, and how closely a fixed curriculum is followed.
The relationship also shapes how well learning goes. Studies referenced in this area suggest that learners who see a teacher as fair, friendly, and even-handed tend to learn more than those who do not, which is why the bond matters as much as the content.
Read together, his three types describe the same relationship stretched along a line, from tightly controlled by the teacher to loosely guided by a mentor.
Livingstone sorts learning by the teacher-learner relationship; the European Commission sorts it by lifelong-learning policy.
For Livingstone, what changes across the three types is who holds authority and how closely a set curriculum is followed.
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