On the negative side, in many developing countries, the gap between the urban and rural areas widened. The trend to grow export crops created a large class of landless peasants whose land were taken over by large corporations. In the late 1970s and 1980s, a different type of development education emerged. It emphasizes rural development and relies on the people of the various communities to identify their needs and establish their own projects. This type of development education relies on nonformal, rather than formal, education.
Nonformal education is educational activity that is carried on outside the formal system.
It includes such programs as agricultural training, health instruction, adult literacy, etc. The Heifer Project, based in Little Rock, is an excellent example of this more humanistic, grassroots concept of development education. It identifies similarities and differences between educational systems. It looks at school organization and curricula within the cultural context within which they operate. It provides students and teachers with a broader perspective from which to examine their own educational system.