Between a Degree and Skills: Non-formal Education as an Adaptive Strategy in Times of Uncertainty
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17721/2306-3971-2026-01-11-11Keywords:
non-formal education, adaptive educational strategy, sociology of education, educational inequality, Russian-Ukrainian warAbstract
This article explores the sociological understanding of non-formal education as an adaptive educational strategy in the context of war, digitalization, and labor market instability. The focus is on the transformation of the social function of education: from a predominantly institutional path toward obtaining a degree to a more flexible logic of skill acquisition, reskilling, and individual adaptation to uncertainty. Theoretically, the article draws on approaches from the sociology of education, concepts of lifelong learning, educational mobility, and unequal access to educational resources. The empirical section is research- and analysis-based: Google Trends and Google Scholar are used as illustrative digital indicators of the topic’s public and academic visibility. Google Trends data indicate that public interest in non-formal education is more often manifested not through the expert category «non-formal education» itself, but through practical queries related to online courses, free education, the English language, programming, digital literacy, and artificial intelligence. Google Scholar data, in turn, demonstrate that in the academic field, this issue is more often described through the broader categories of distance learning, adult education, and lifelong learning. The scientific novelty of the article lies in combining the conceptual framework of an adaptive educational strategy with an analysis of the digital visibility of non-formal education in public and academic spaces. It is concluded that non-formal education in contemporary Ukraine is not only an additional educational format but also an important mechanism for social adaptation and professional flexibility, and at the same time a potential space for the reproduction of new inequalities. These trends underscore the need to rethink public education policy and integrate non-formal practices into the overall strategy for the post-war restoration of Ukraine’s human capital.
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