The Master Betrayed

Work & Play

A mind that never plays forgets how to grow; a mind that never works forgets how to become.

Work and Play begins with an apparent detour, a question about autism, but quickly reveals why “work and play” is not a soft subject. It is about the conditions under which attention, empathy, learning, and culture can flourish. McGilchrist is careful from the outset: to describe certain features of modern life as “more autistic” is not to denigrate autistic people. Autism is not a single entity; there are “autisms”, with different profiles, strengths, and challenges. Some people with autism, as Temple Grandin has described, think primarily in images and are surprised to learn that others think in phrases. Others experience the opposite: language becomes so dominant that it is hard to get outside it. The point is not to moralise, but to notice resemblances between an isolated left-hemisphere style of attention and certain strands of autism — a resemblance he says many clinicians and autistic people themselves have recognised.

If we ask what the least controversial functions of the right hemisphere are, McGilchrist suggests we quickly arrive at three: sustained attention, reading faces, and empathy. Damage to the right hemisphere can impair these capacities. And these, he observes, are precisely the capacities that seem to be eroding in our society. He recalls a moment after a talk when a teacher said that in the last few years they had found themselves having to teach five- to seven-year-olds how to read the human face — a sentence that would once have seemed almost unimaginable. Alongside this are reports from teachers who have used the same tests for decades and now find that a significant portion of a class struggles with tasks that require sustained attention. Add to this research suggesting declining empathy among young people, and a troubling picture forms: not a change in brain structure, but a change in culture that rewards the wrong kind of attention.

This is where work and play enter, not as lifestyle tips, but as forms of attention. Play is not frivolity. It is the open, exploratory mode in which possibilities appear. It is how children learn: by trying, failing, improvising, and trying again without the shame of fixed outcomes. In play, the right hemisphere’s strengths - context-sensitivity, relational awareness, and flexible responsiveness - are naturally exercised. Work, by contrast, is the capacity to commit, persist, and submit to the demands of a craft. It is how potential becomes skill. It requires discipline, repetition, and patience: the ability to continue when novelty has worn off.

Modern education, McGilchrist argues, has managed to lose both. It has lost play because classrooms are increasingly micro-controlled: targets, audits, and constant assessment leave little room for imaginative exploration. Yet it has also lost rigorous discipline in the deeper sense — not the drill of standardised outputs, but the gradual formation of self-discipline through meaningful challenge. The result is a system that is simultaneously oppressive and lax: oppressive in its bureaucracy, lax in its vision.

Underlying this is a misconception of what education is. Education, McGilchrist reminds us, means to “lead out” — not to insert information, but to draw out what is already latent. The teacher is therefore not a delivery mechanism, but a leader in the older sense: someone whose presence, enthusiasm, and example ignite the student’s attention. He returns again to the metaphor of gardening. You cannot force a flower into existence because you like flowers; you can only plant, tend, and create the conditions in which growth can unfold. Teaching is not manufacture. It is cultivation. And cultivation requires relationship — a “between us” — not mere transmission.

This is why exemplars matter. We are not propelled forward by blind forces from behind, McGilchrist says, but attracted by what we love: by people who embody a way of being we admire. If the figures most visible to young people are shallow, narcissistic, and unempathic, then the culture will drift accordingly. If teachers and elders embody depth, curiosity, and care, they offer something else to imitate. Play, in this sense, is not just an activity but an atmosphere: the permission to explore under the steady gaze of someone trustworthy.

Yet none of this works without rigour. McGilchrist is explicit that discipline is essential, both externally and internally, because self-discipline is learned through practice. The mistake is to equate rigour with narrow metrics — “six right answers” about Jane Austen — rather than with the widening of attention and aspiration. Real rigour challenges students to learn more because they can see where it leads: into mathematics that opens the world, into languages that expand perception, into literature that deepens empathy.

The conversation then widens beyond school. Learning does not stop at graduation, yet many systems are built as if it does. McGilchrist even suggests that going straight from school to university should not be the default. A period of work in the real world can mature attention, strengthen responsibility, and help people discover what they truly want to study. He points to medicine as a case where premature specialisation is especially costly: to be a doctor is to be in relationship with people, not merely to process diagnoses. He recalls a time when doctors could do little in technical terms yet were deeply valued because they were present — in homes, in communities, in lives.

That word “there” becomes important. The postman was there; the bank teller was there; the doctor was there. Increasingly, we replace people with systems. Supermarket queues are “solved” with machines rather than more human beings. For the elderly, those small points of contact may be among the last remaining touchpoints of everyday relationship. Automation may be efficient, but it quietly thins the social fabric. It removes the very encounters that teach us to read faces, sustain attention, and practice empathy.

In the end, work and play are revealed as partners. Play without work stays airy; work without play turns dead. A flourishing culture needs both: fallow time in which ideas gestate, and long, unromantic hours in which craft is formed. When the balance holds, attention remains human, and education becomes once again the fostering of a flame.