EDUCATION, SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL精选.pdfVIP

Published in: Journal of Educational Thought , vol.43, no.2, 2009, pp. 93-108. EDUCATION, SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL: REFLECTIONS ON THE WORK OF HERMANN HESSE Peter Roberts University of Canterbury, New Zealand peter.roberts@canterbury.ac.nz The novelist and Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse placed supreme importance on the value of the individual. From his youth Hesse had rebelled against the imposition of social authority on the individual, and he continued this resistance throughout his adult life. The First World War had a profound impact on his thinking and writing. He described this as a ‘cruel awakening’ (Hesse, 1974a, p. 10) and in the years following the War he found himself utterly at odds with the spirit of his times in his native Germany. He spent much of his life in Switzerland. Hesse saw himself as an ‘upolitical man’ and even when writing about the War, he wanted to guide the reader ‘not into the world theatre with its political problems but into his innermost being, before the judgement seat of his very personal conscience’ (p. 11). In Hesse’s novels and short stories, many of which have an educational focus, the theme of individual spiritual striving is paramount. His early novel, Peter Camenzind (Hesse, 1969), provides a fictionalised biographical account of the title character’s life, from his early years in the mountains, through his time as a student and his development as a 2 writer, to his later life of devotion to a disabled friend and his elderly father. Beneath the Wheel (Hesse, 1968a) details the traumatic school experience