About Us

People Like Us was formed in 2004 by a group of people who recognised that there was a need to embrace a different way of learning.

Following many years experience in formal educational settings it became more and more urgent to establish an antidote to formalized learning. We wanted to offer informal learning opportunities to people so they were part of the learning process. This takes place in two ways:-

In the first place and at the heart of this type of learning situation is communication - it is a form of experiential learning which involves a direct encounter with the phenomena being studied rather than merely thinking about the encounter.

On the other hand the second type of experiential learning is education that occurs as a direct participation in the events of life. Here learning is not sponsored by some formal educational institution but by people themselves.

At one level the purpose of informal education is no different to any other form of education. In one situation we may focus on healthy eating, citizenship or human rights.

However, running through all this is a concern to build the sorts of communities and relationships in which people can be happy and fulfilled.

Of course our ethos is not new but has for a long period somehow been forgotten in the race to meet political outcomes and social targets.

We have reflected much of John Dewey’s pedagogic creed who once described this as educating so that people may share in a common life.

It is learning that is achieved through reflection upon everyday experience and is the way that most of us do our learning. People like us.

Further reading at www.infed.org