From West to East and Back Again: Faith,Doubt and Education in Hermann Hesse's Later Work

This paper examines Hermann Hesse's penultimate novel, The Journey to the East, from an educational point of view. Hesse was a man of the West who turned to the idea of ‘the East’ in seeking to understand himself and his society. While highly critical of elements of Western modernism, Hesse nonetheless viewed ‘the East’ through Western lenses and drew inspiration from other Western thinkers. At the end of The Journey to the East, the main character, H.H., believes he has found the solution to his despair. This paper argues that he has not, at least not in the fullest sense Hesse came to see was possible. H.H. relies too heavily on faith and abandons reason too quickly in seeking to become ‘absorbed’ into the Other that he regards as his higher self. An answer to H.H.'s existential angst can be found in Hesse's final novel, The Glass Bead Game, where educational growth through the development of a critical, questioning, inquiring attitude is a central theme.     

Faculty Development through Computer Awareness

Although the use of microcomputers and their associated software programmes has the potential to help faculty work more efficiently, their use is not yet as widespread as it might be and many faculty members are still unaware of how they might use computers both to facilitate their own research and report writing and as an adjunct to their teaching. Efforts to encourage greater usage of computers which emphasise the acquisition of appropriate skills only, in many instances appear to have limited long-term effectiveness. A multi-dimensional model for the promotion of educational change has been developed and tested in a stafl development programme to promote the awareness and use of computers to assist faculty at a large Australian institute of technology. The beginnings of the model and the programme are described together with the results of an initial post-programme survey. These represent the preliminaly findings of a longitudinal study of effective models for the promotion of educational innovation in higher education. The initial results suggest implications both for the teaching of computer awareness and for the building of an effective theory of innovative change in higher education [1].