#16. The Most Fundamental Right is the Right to Quit

The right to quit promotes happiness and wellbeing not just in play, but in all of life.

Dear friends,

My research into play has led me to think about the right to quit. The right to quit is essential to play, but it is also the real driver of justice in all of life. Essentially all activities have a playful quality if one can freely quit and lack that quality if quitting isn’t possible.

We like to think of human rights in affirmative terms, so we speak most often of our rights to move toward what we want: our rights to vote, assemble freely, speak freely, and choose our own paths to happiness. My contention here, however, is that the most basic right—the right that makes all other rights possible—is the right to quit.

Quitting often has negative connotations in our minds. We grow up hearing things like, “Quitters never win, winners never quit.” We’re supposed to stick things out, no matter how tough the going. I rather like this variation, which I heard somewhere: “Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win and never quit are idiots.”

If we move our minds out of the quagmire of competition (indeed, we can’t win tennis matches by quitting) and think of life’s broader goals—the goals of surviving, avoiding injury, finding happiness, and living in accordance with our personal values among people whom we respect and who respect us—then we see that freedom to quit is essential to all these goals. I am talking here about the freedom to walk away from people and situations that are harmful to our wellbeing.

I start here with the role of quitting in play, but then turn to the role of quitting in other realms of life.

The Right to Quit Makes Play Safe, Fair, and Fun for All.

One of the defining characteristics of play is that it is voluntary (see Letter #2). You start to play at something because you want to do it, but then at some point you no longer want to do it, and then you quit. If for some reason you can’t quit, even if that reason comes from some compulsion within your head (such as the belief that you must finish what you start), then the activity is no longer play.

The right to quit is part of what makes play so valuable for children’s learning and development. This right is why children dare to try things in play that they would be afraid to try otherwise. The young girl wants to climb a tree. In the condition of play, where nobody is judging her, nobody is forcing her or even urging her to go higher, she is in complete control of how high she goes. She enjoys the thrill of a degree of fear coupled with a sense of triumph as she climbs. But at some point the fear overwhelms the joy, so she quits and comes down. The next time she will, on her own volition, go a little higher before it becomes too frightening. What is true for climbing trees is true for all sorts of activities that entail a degree of risk (see Letter #8 on risky play).

In social play (play with others), the right to quit underlies children’s learning to negotiate, cooperate, and generally attend to the desires of others, not just their own desires. Suppose you and I are children who start playing together and I am a bit of a bully. I insist that we play what I want to play, in the way I want to play, and I ignore your facial expressions of unhappiness and requests to do something different. The result, if you are a healthy, self-respecting child, is that you will quit. You will go off and play with someone else.

You did not do this to teach me a lesson, yet you taught me one. I may not learn it right away, but over time I will learn that if I want to play with others, I must pay attention to their desires, not just my own, and I must negotiate and compromise to find a way of playing that all the players enjoy. So, the right to quit allowed you to leave a noxious situation and helped me begin to learn one of life’s most valuable lessons, that of attending to others’ needs and wishes. In Letter #9, on the contrast between play and adult-directed sports, I showed how this most valuable lesson is destroyed when adults take control of children’s “play” such that it is no longer really play and quitting is difficult if not impossible.

The Right to Quit is a Foundation for Marital Harmony.

It is surprisingly easy to leap from thinking about two children playing to thinking about two adults in a marriage. A happy marriage is impossible unless both partners have learned how to attend to the other’s needs and wishes, to detect when the other is happy or not, and to compromise and negotiate to play out their entwined lives in mutually satisfying ways. And when marriage fails, and continues to fail, the right to quit is a saving grace, sometimes even a life-saving grace.

Research has revealed that the legal and economic freedom to divorce is a major force against domestic violence. For example, one study  revealed large declines in domestic violence and in women’s suicides, state by state in the United States, when states made unilateral divorce legal. Another study revealed that when costs for divorce were reduced in Spain, making divorce easier for most families, rates of domestic violence declined greatly. The research suggested that domestic violence declined not just because of actual divorces, but also because those who didn’t want to lose their spouse started treating that person with more understanding and kindness.

There was a time when stories and songs glorified the woman who “stuck with her man,” no matter how bad he was. The man eventually came around through the sheer power of her love and devotion. But research as well as logic indicate that men behave better when their wives might leave them than when wives will stay no matter what.

The Right to Quit Distinguishes Employment from Slavery.

The same principle also applies in the workplace. If you can’t quit your job because you are owned by or legally bound to your employer, or because economic necessity prevents you from quitting, then your employer can brutalize and exploit you and get away with it. If you can walk away, then your employer must treat you well if they want to retain your services. The legal and economic capacity to quit is the force that tends to equalize the relationship between employer and employee. There is no mystery here.

The Right to Quit is a Foundation for Democracy and Human Rights in Nations.

The principle applies at the level of nations as well as that of individual human relationships. Nations in which leaders routinely oppress their own people can get away with it through laws that make it impossible for people to leave. Within two months after the Russian revolution of 1917, the new government enacted laws against emigration. That was the beginning of the end of any chance for democracy within the communist regime. The same thing happened in the other communist-bloc countries, and we see it today, for example, in North Korea. Governments can brutalize people who can’t leave. When people can leave, governments must figure out how to make people want to stay; or else there will be nobody left to govern. The first to leave are often those who are most competent and valuable.

In School, Children Are Not Free to Quit, so What Are the Consequences?

In general, children are the most brutalized of people, not because they are small and weak, but because they don’t have the same freedoms to quit that adults have. Anthropologists tell me that this is not so true in hunter-gatherer societies, because children there, to a considerable degree, can quit, much as adults can. Children who are treated unkindly by their parents can move into a different hut, with different adults, who will treat them kindly. They can even move to a different band. (I will have more to say about hunter-gatherer societies in a future letter.) Hunter-gatherers don’t hold to the notion that parents own their children. Nearly everyone enjoys children, and the whole band shares in the care of every child, so children are not a burden. Even very young children who are mistreated by a parent or another caregiver can move away from that caregiver, or be taken away by a friend or relative, and find safety in others’ arms. That is not true in our society, and domestic violence against children is a serious and continuing problem.

But now I want to turn to the violence we do to our children by forcing them into schools. When schooling is compulsory, schools are, by definition, prisons. A prison is a place where one is forced to be and within which people are not free to choose their own activities, spaces, or associates. Children cannot walk away from school, and within the school children cannot walk away from mean teachers, oppressive and pointless assignments, or cruel classmates. For some children, the only out—the only real way to quit—is suicide. As writer Helen Smith put it in her book, The Scarred Heart, in describing the suicide of a 13-year-old girl who had been regularly bullied in school: “After missing fifty-three out of the required one hundred and eighty days of school, she was told that she would have to return to school or appear before a truancy board which could then send her to a juvenile detention center. She decided the better alternative was to go into her bedroom and hang herself with a belt. ... In times past, she could have just dropped out of school, but now kids like her are trapped by compulsory education."

Lots of words have been spent on the problem of school bullying and related problems such as students’ general unhappiness, boredom, and cynicism in school. Nobody has found a way to solve these problems, and nobody ever will until we grant children the freedom to quit. The only way to solve these problems, ultimately, is to do away with the coercion.

When children are truly free to walk away from school, schools will have to become child-friendly places to survive. Children are natural learners and love to learn in their self-chosen ways, but, like all of us, they hate to be coerced, micromanaged, and continuously judged. Schools, like all institutions, will become moral institutions only when the people they serve are no longer inmates. When students are free to quit, schools will have to grant them other basic human rights, such as the right to have a voice in decisions that affect them, the right to free speech, the right to free assembly, and the right to choose their own paths to happiness. Such schools would look nothing at all like the dreary institutions we call “school” today. (For more on this and examples of schools that work, see my book Free to Learn.)

Final Thoughts

Please don’t interpret me here as saying I am against doing things that are difficult. Almost everything worth doing is difficult, at least at times. What I am saying is that we are all best off if the decision to stick it out or not is up to us, not to legal dictum nor someone with power over us. As I watch children play and in other ways follow their own interests, I see them working intensely, often with considerable frustration, at difficult endeavors. Difficulty, or challenge, in fact, is what makes play interesting and ultimately enjoyable. But the reason children persist through the difficult parts is because they know they are in control. If the activity becomes too painful and no longer meaningful, they can quit.

I invite you to add own comments and questions in the comments section below. Perhaps you would like to add to the value of this letter by describing a situation where you or a friend made a difficult decision to quit. I would welcome that and believe other readers would too. If you aren’t already subscribed to this Substack series, please do so now, and let others who might be interested know about it. By subscribing, you will receive an email notification of each new letter.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter