European Youth Forum

Education

Education is of the utmost importance to young people, giving them, as it does, the possibility to ensure their personal and professional development and their active participation in all spheres of society; thus increasing their job opportunities and contributing to the prevention of their social exclusion. Although the common view of education tends to focus on its formal and institutionalised nature, education is a lifelong process. It is also a life-wide process, taking place in formal, informal and non-formal contexts.

The European Youth Forum works towards strengthening the relationship and complementarity between formal, non-formal and informal education in the framework of life-long and life-wide learning, with its work focusing particularly on non-formal education - this being education taking place outside formal institutions, in alternative structures such as youth organisations. Indeed, youth organisations are the most important providers of non-formal education and the framework they offer is a determining factor in the quality of non-formal education and its long-term impact. Moreover, the structure of democratic youth organisations gives young people the possibility to experience and learn about the principles of participative democracy and active citizenship.