Alternative Models of Art Education: Kibbo Kift

In the 1920s, in the southeast of England, a striking band of disaffected youth leaders, former Suffragettes and spiritual seekers and social reformers, aimed to create an egalitarian, pacifist, new world through an idiosyncratic blend of campaigning, camping, hiking, and handicrafts.

They were led by an artist, John Hargrave, and with many other artists among their number, which amounted to around a thousand strong membership, they were aiming for nothing less than creating an alternative society, a crucible for crafting change. This is the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, this is John Hargrave.

It was premised on the idea that the Great War had destroyed the myth of a civilised world, and so what was posed was that a radical reformulation of society was needed, and that would be one that was based on proximity to nature; one that would foreground what they understood as indigenous knowledge.

Kibbo Kift is a curious term. It's an antiquarian English colloquialism and it means proof of strength. It was physical strength and spiritual strength that was being promoted, a kind of regeneration of humanity. And it was both primitivist and futurist. It was much more than a training in art production. It was nothing less than a new way of life. 

Hargrave argued that looking outside the white Western world would supply what he said “was lacking in the current school system." He was a professional artist, but he had not attended art school, and he was fiercely dismissive of its value, complaining that “the ability to evolve designs and decorations from natural objects is a lost art.” He praised what he saw in books of ethnography and what he saw in ethnographic collections in museums, arguing “very few art students, turned out of our art schools are able to sit down and make a design anything like as beautiful, simple, and symbolic of nature as the designs that we find in these ethnographic collections." He emphasised in this self-expression, by symbolism, the modern art school has much to learn. To be exact, he said “the art student can draw a conventional leaf shape, with both sides exactly alike and geometrically balanced. But this, he has learned from a test card or cast.” So, non-industrial societies, Kibbo Kift members felt, understood nature as a teacher and the outdoor world as their art school.

Kibbo Kift members imagined that those who lived outside industrialised western culture were concerned with fundamentals, with core principles: food, warmth, shelter, and so-called civilised people had lost touch with what mattered. So, they were arguing that intellectual sophistication in a lecture hall meant nothing if you couldn't survive in the woods. Consequently, makers in the organisation shared skills together in stencilling and printmaking, woodworking, leather work, dyeing, basketry, spinning, weaving, embroidery, photography, calligraphy and more. And hand manufacturers suited the organisation's principles. 

They had massive ambitions to reorganise industry; handcraft made their philosophies material.

So art needed to be purposeful rather than decorative. It should contribute to the making of a better world. And in one of their quotations, they said, “we do not go in for blotters, for auntie and paper knives for uncles.” Their crafts were tools for survival. They were tools for self-development. Kinfolk likened this practice to the making of a canoe. They said it was a real necessity for a lake dweller. He could paddle in it. He wanted it. He needed it. It was not something to be put in a lake dweller handicraft exhibition. So, they made their ritual and camping costumes.

They made personal totems showing their mythological alter egos, and they made their tents and their rucksacks which they took to camp. And their eclectic aesthetic combined Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, First Nation, and Egyptian imagery with modernist pattern in flats, bright colours. And members were very conversant with new art movements, with Cubism, with Dada, with the The Ballets Russes and so on. But mostly they took their inspiration from outside the European avantgarde, so they looked to ancient and non-west. And forms, and then they mixed them together to make new hybrids. 

So, they stood apart from all other art movements and from all other arts education systems, and this was partly due to their aggressive contempt for all other organisations. 

They were positing Kibbo Kift as the singular solution to all of the world's ills. And so consequently, they had to derive all other efforts. Their practices were fundamentally oppositional. They were anti-art school, but they were anti almost everything that perhaps doomed them to remain as outsiders. They didn't last for more than a decade, but they offer a tantalising glimpse of what an alternative art school, or indeed an alternative society might look like.

I suppose Kibbo Kift are supremely performers because they're aiming to kind of dress-rehearse the new world that they want to bring into being. They want to live the change that they want to be. They want to design all aspects of the new world from scratch.

So new language, new costume, new ways of relating to one another, new forms of economics, new forms of industry, new forms of education. They're nothing if, total in their ambitions, even a kind of new religion.

So, they dress the parts, they perform that world. They temporarily inhabit that world, and partly they're temporarily inhabiting it because they've got no money. They would like to have a permanent space, but they have no money at all. 

They're mostly white-collar workers in the southeast of England. They're mostly civil servants. Quite a lot of them are teachers. They go to school nine to five, five days a week or, you know, they're weekend warriors in a way, but they take up tents and they build their own camps in order to, kind of, try out that world that they're hoping for in miniature. And you know, being schooled or being kind of tutored in creative practice. A lot of the members were artists, but lots of them weren't. So they learned the skills of dress making, they learned the skills of tent making. Being able to make all aspects of your kits; to be able to build your own shelter, to be able to make your own rucksack, walk miles to camp, build your own structures, source your own food and so on. That was seen to be part of the skills that you would need for a post-apocalyptic world. 

So, those were important things to master, not just purely as a kind of cheap holiday. It was a structure that they were gonna build. They were gonna lead this new world. They needed people who were strong and skilled to kind of make it happen.

Kibbo Kift had a really interesting organisational structure because quite a few of them were sort of disaffected youth leaders. The founder and several other members had defected from the Boy Scouts, and indeed some of the female leaders had come out of sort of girl guide groups, and equivalent outdoor youth groups, because they were strongly opposed to what they saw as the kind of militaristic discipline. And although those sort of outdoor camping and hiking movements had been massively popular and some of the members had even grown up in those organisations, they looked very different when the First World War broke out. And the pacifists and socialists and cooperators who kind of formed the basis of early Kibo Kift membership were really strongly opposed to the sort of military drill and the marching and the whistling and the barked orders and things like that. Instead, they drew more on the other side of those sort of scouting and outdoor youth movements, which was the kind of campfire mysticism and some of the sort of primitivist play, meant to be mimic a kind of the egalitarian camping in circles that they thought was what went on in Native American kind of tribal life. Of course they only received this information through second-hand sources. So it was all rather a sort of fantasy.

But they have this idea that outside of the Western world, there was this kind of egalitarian world, a pacifist world that lived close to nature that they could learn from and incorporate ideas into their organisation. So, there was a sense of, kind of doing things collectively some of the time, singing in circles. Those were kinds of alternative forms of discipline.

You know they didn't require somebody to kind of shout out, ‘do this, do that’. But they still created a kind of structure – a ceremonial structure. And the organisation is nothing if not eclectic. They were bringing in ideas from the Boy Scouts. They were also bringing in ideas from Ritual Magic. So, you've got this kind of ideas of meeting in circles and sort of making things happen and manifesting them in kind of outdoor spaces and kind of collectively sort of imagining that came out of a sort of culture of ritual magic as well.

It's quite a heady blend and the educators in the organisation were turning to experiment.

There were quite a lot of teachers. They tended to be teachers who were experimenting with forest school practices that were emerging in the twenties with child-led curricular, like Summerhill School and its early manifestations. So they tended to be kind of educational experimenters. There was a blend of stuff being played out and toyed with. But the organisation was full of contradictions; they had this single-minded leader who didn't want this circular structure to go too far, he didn't want a wholly democratic organisation because he didn't want to be voted out. So it was very much a top-down vision. It was kind of built in the image of the founder really...  it's kind of complicated in terms of structures.

Prof. Annebella Pollen is a Professor of Visual and Material Culture at the University of Brighton where she researches undervalued archives and untold stories in art and design history. She is also the author of several books including Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life (2015); The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians (2015), and Art without Frontiers: The Story of the British Council, Visual Arts and a Changing World (2024).

This was recorded and transcribed from a wider panel discussion titled "Inside Out" during ROOM, a one-day gathering that took place on 7 June 2025, marking the tenth anniversary of Freelands Foundation and the first activation of its new home on 12 Errol Street, EC1Y. The day was dedicated to gathering and sharing artist-teaching practices, while serving as a blueprint for mapping the potential of our new space and exploring a vision for the next decade of the Foundation’s work.