Questioning Authority through play
By Pi Evans. Illustration by Rory Robertson-Shaw
The Woodcraft Folk is a cooperative youth movement. It was originally established in the 1920s by young people who wanted to create an organisation that facilitated a relationship between children and nature whilst rejecting much of the hierarchy and nationalism of other youth movements at the time. In opposition to the authoritarian tendencies of the Scouts, the Woodcraft Folk aims at more horizontal structures. When the Woodcraft Folk started, children were generally expected to refer to their teachers and guardians by the titles 'Sir' and 'Miss'. However, at Woodcraft, these formalities were avoided. New names and titles were given to both young people and adult volunteers, linguistically signalling an aspiration, if not always a reality, of engaging with one another on more equal terms.
Woodcraft also disregards the Scouts' nationalism. Instead of pledging allegiance to king and country, the young people of the Woodcraft Folk are encouraged to 'span the world with friendship'. This internationalist aim is made more tangible through regular international camps and membership of the international umbrella organisation of socialist youth groups: IFM-SEI.
In 2025, the Woodcraft Folk celebrates its 100th anniversary. Over the years, it has undoubtedly changed, but has also maintained a commitment to a central purpose: education for social change. It aims to educate young people about the world around them and empower them to change it. For Woodcraft Folk, the key skill children can learn is cooperation, and the best way to learn this is through action. By cooperating with one another and being included in democratic decision-making, young people are better prepared to create and imagine a more equitable society.
Cooperation
Cooperation is a skill that we all use in daily life. Even the capitalist economic system, which separates us into individuals, relies on our capacity to work together. Without cooperation, we'd never get anything done. That we all can and do cooperate, at least sometimes, can serve to disguise the radical possibilities that it presents. Cooperatives—groups of people coming together to meet their needs—are essential both for sustaining struggles in the present, and because they can prefigure other ways of organising the world around us.
Cooperation is as old as human society. Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist biologist, revealed that cooperation—or mutual aid—is not just a human trait, but also an essential skill for animal survival and evolution. However, while cooperatives are not new, and cooperation may very well be an evolved trait, that doesn't mean it is always easy to come together, organise, and make decisions. Cooperatives bring people together to meet a shared need, but cooperation can, and often does, happen without a radical rethinking of society. Radical cooperation—cooperation aimed at achieving social change—is something that must be practised, and something that can be learned.
Learning by Doing
Cooperation is part of everyday life, so practising radical cooperation doesn’t require hours of reading and reflecting on dense political literature. It doesn't even have to mean leaving society behind and going to live in a commune. The Woodcraft Folk experiment with cooperation every week up and down the country, where children aged between 6 and 15 come together and play.
Play is key in learning to cooperate because play only really works for any length of time when we work together. Games offer us the chance to experiment with different types of social relations. Especially good games can even provide space to question and contest authority, and the rules of the game itself.
Woodcraft Folk games often try to act out unequal or hierarchical aspects of the world. The aim is not for young people to follow the rules of the game, but rather to provide space to rethink them. Understanding how to work with others to meet a goal, a classical element of gameplay, is expanded. In the face of unfair or impossible rules, or even just boring bureaucracy, children in Woodcraft Folk are not only allowed, but are encouraged to question how things are done. To not just play the game they are told, but to play the games they want.
However, cooperation isn't always fun and games. Sometimes, it's about making a decision or listening to what others have to say. Sometimes, it's about doing the washing up. Woodcraft Folk have strategies for teaching these skills—skills they share with anyone who gets involved, whatever their age.
It’s not just children who practice and learn cooperative skills in Woodcraft Folk. Parents and volunteers are also challenged to rethink social relations. Everyone attending residential and international camps is expected to play their part. Organised into ‘clans’, adults and children cook, clean, and put up tents together. These skills are just as important as playing at revolutionary rupture, which also happens.
Sharing out tasks and experimenting with living together in opposition to gender and age hierarchies are important, both because they reveal the inequality inherent in the rest of our lives, but also because they offer a chance to practice something different. In camps, these small acts of care are cultivated with the understanding that these spaces are created together through the work of all participants.
Cooperative education can provide the basis for reimagining the world by opening up opportunities to contest rules, and by teaching us how to meet our needs collectively. Learning to cooperate isn’t something limited to only one point in our lives; it’s helpful for all ages. In the Woodcraft Folk, young people are active in democratic decision-making, forming their own councils and writing their own policy. It also means that adults should be included in play, so they too can practice important skills based around both failure and imagination.
Education for social change is essential, now just as much as it was in 1925. We can't wait until after the revolution to begin practising new social relations. Radical cooperation that recognises how we work together and seeks to expand it must be part of our lives today.
Pi Evans has lived, worked, and organised with co-operatives in Manchester and London. They have been a member of the Woodcraft Folk for almost 20 years.
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