What is needed is to motivate the Muslim families that are educationally backward to take up education on priority by sacrificing some of their comforts for the future of their children. There are three types of education relevant to the development of Muslims. These are informal education, non-formal education, formal education. Each of these has its own specific and unique role to play. A brief description of this is presented in this article to highlight the significance of informal and non-formal education and their linkages.
Informal education accounts for the greatest share of any person s total lifetime learning.
In many respects it is also the most crucial, since it is what begins earliest in life, in infancy, and includes the learning of basic codes necessary to future learning and survival. It is equated by some with socialization, the process by which a person learns how to exist as a social being and acquires consciousness, language, control of body processes, use of physical and motor resources, restraint of impulses, how to relate to various other people, and other learning necessary to life in a given social group or culture. Informal education goes on in the context of everyday life in practically any kind of setting or environment in which humans exist. It is casual rather than planned, for both the teachers and learners, and often incidental to some other activity. The family is probably the single most influential source of informal learning.