Disalienation in the management classroom: lessons from Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game

In contemporary academia, education is often perceived as a supplement to an academic career or a tool to satisfy management through course evaluations and this can alienate academics from teaching. To create inspiration and deepen the understanding of teachers’ alienation as well as disalienation in the management classroom, we draw on Hermann Hesse’s last novel ‘The Glass Bead Game’. The story of Joseph Knecht who escapes an elitist pedagogical province to engage in personal teaching serves as an inspiration through which we discuss the act of resisting alienation in contemporary management education. Alienation, as we learn from Hesse, is not an unchangeable condition and it can be resisted through reinventing personal teaching, re-focusing attention from the demands of academic excellence to the imperfection of human beings, and acknowledging education as a history maker and teaching as a preparation for life and death.