Formal and Informal education

As i understand it  formal education is a studying at school and informal education is what you learn by your own.  There is some comparisons of these types of education: http://enhancinged.wgbh.org/started/what/formal.html

Differences between functionalists and marxists.

Functionalists:

• Education provides a society with 'division of labour' which means that schools will help to identify who you will be in a future
• Education socialises children with society's shared norms and values. The process of socialisation moves children away from the particularistic values of their home life towards the universalistic values of society
• The 'hidden curriculum'  helps to integrate future citizens into society's by 'teaching' and reinforcing them with society's norms and values 
• Education helps provide the means for people to make themselves upwardly mobile. Therefore if you make the effort you will be rewarded - meritocracy.  This process legitimizes social inequalities as functionalists believe everyone has the opportunity to get a qualifications. Education is a level playing field - if you fail to achieve at school it is nobody's fault but your own - meritocracy.

Marxists:

• Social class - Education helps meet the needs of society by dividing it into distinct  social - classes the rulling (bosses) and working class (workers)
• For Marxists, the role of education is considered in terms of the idea that there is always a basic “conflict of interest” in Capitalist society. The most-fundamental conflict is between Capital (the owners of the means of production) and Labour (people who sell their labour power in exchange for money). Marxists try to relate all other forms of conflict (gender, age, racial, etc.) to the economic sphere.
   
  Marxists are mainly concerned with analysing the way education involves the transmission of ideas and beliefs about the nature of the social world. The reason for this is that education is a process that enables a ruling class to reproduce its domination of other social classes. It does this by trying to socialise children with ideas that legitimise the nature of society “as it is”; that is, a society in which there are fundamental inequalities of wealth, income, power and status. 
   
   The concept used to express this idea is that of structured inequality (inequality that stems from the nature of relationships within Capitalist societies). Inequality is structural in origin because it is fundamental to the economic system.
  A ruling class, if it is to continue in power, must ensure it reproduces itself over time. People have to be socialised into accepting the basic ideas of Capitalism. 

(http://www.slideshare.net/sociologytwynham/marxist-functionalist-differences-presentation)