Holistic teaching is seen in the context of a healing relationship. It is vital that students feel a relationship with the teacher and their fellow students.
The class functions as an experiential group where students participate in role plays, exercises, share themselves and discuss issues. Aggressive curiosity is encouraged and a communal learning forum established. Lecture material is presented for approximately half the class and the rest is experientially based.

ICARUS College utilises a unique holistic approach to training founded by Dallas Gibson in the early 1970s during his early days in understanding and experimenting with how to teach people from all walks of life and levels in society, to read dynamically and study in a comprehensively proactive manner which ensured assiduous students astounding success. This holistic approach was founded on an amalgamation of the methods of Professor Julius Sumner Miller, Dr Stanley Milgram a leading psychologist of the 20th century, Edward de Bono an extant creative thinker of global renown and Evelyn Wood who pioneered Reading Dynamics in the 1960s. The employ of an exaggerated reciprocating ratio between "non-teaching, authoritarianism based on sound knowledge of the subject matter and unorthodox approaches has proven most successful in applications to numerous disciplines and notably beneficial in overcoming student psychosocial problems engendered during upbringing through early domestic cross cultural and adverse parental influences atypical to those likely to be experienced locally. This coupled with Dynamic Reading an improved paradigm developed by Dallas Gibson and evolved from Evelyn Woods early model Reading Dynamics form the basis of ICARUS College renowned Teaching Method.

About Julius Sumner Miller

Professor Julius Sumner Miller on What is Needed to be a Good Teacher

"What I have to say holds for the teaching of anything -- science, literature, poetry, mathematics, navigation and rockclimbing -- all, indeed, that comes within the pale of human knowledge.

My view is this: We TEACH nothing. We do not teach psychology nor do we teach STUDENTS. (I take psychology as an example.) NO ONE IS TAUGHT ANYTHING! Here lies the folly of his business. We try to teach somebody something. This is a sorry endeavour for no one can be taught a thing.

What we do, if we are successful, is to stir interest in the matter at hand, awaken enthusiasm for it, arouse a curiosity, kindle a feeling, fire up the imagination -- and now she who is exposed in this fashion goes on her own way.

Not too many teachers are endowed or equipped to do these things. And for this we can in part blame their teachers. This scheme of 'instruction' is a far cry from the mere communication and recitation of facts.

What is needed is competence first and enthusiasm first. There is nothing second! Although each or one of these alone is a good start, one without the other is impotent. But if I had a choice I would have enthusiasm first. The teacher must herself be excited if she is to sell her goods. And she can do an exciting job in stirring the student without herself knowing all the answers.

As I see it then, the teacher communicates too much fact and the students ingests too much. The teachers tells her what she should know, this she acquires transiently and superficially, and to the degree she regurgitates it is her success measured. And her brain has been barely touched. Teachers must, I say, recite LESS facts, ASK MORE questions, in classrooms, on the campus or on a wilderness experience. The drama and beauty and aesthetics of the subject must be pointed up.

The intellectual process must be STIRRED. A FEELING for knowledge for its own sake must be engendered. Learning will then be an exciting adventure which few can escape, nor will many wish to. And it will bring the spirit to a great awakening which can likely last a lifetime."

About Stanley Milgram

Stanley Milgram was raised in New York city where he was born in 1933. He graduated from James Monroe High School in 1950, along with fellow classmate and future social psychologist, Phil Zimbardo. A true city lover, he went on to earn his bachelor's degree from Queens College in 1954. His profound love of city life which was reflected in his 1970 article for Science on "The
Experience of City Living."

Milgram went on for advanced study at Harvard where he earned his Ph.D. under Gordan Allport. Allport was very encouraging and supportive to his students even when their views differed from those of his own. And, Milgram was interested in social issues. This was a foreshadowing of the emerging field of urban psychology. His dissertation investigated cross-cultural differences in conformity which he conducted in Norway and Paris. Upon his return from Paris, Milgram spent 1959-1960 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton with Solomon Asch. Asch was concerned with conformity and had completed his famous studies of conformity that required subjects to select lines judged to be the same size. The correct choices that would have been made were offset by counterfeit alternatives that were selected by the experimeter's confederates. These conflicting opinions induced the selection of lines that were not even close to the same length as the other. Milgram changed the design from lines to shocks and conducted his famous series of studies on obedience to authority.

Instead of pursuing issues defined by academicians, Milgram much preferred to tackle subjects that affected the average man or woman on the street. For example, once his mother-in-law asked him why people no longer gave up their seats on the subway. Milgram reasoned that New Yorkers were not hard and cold city dwellers, but instead were inhibited against engaging each other. He sent out his students to investigate this and concluded that his theory was accurate. In 1972, he returned to Paris to study Parisian's mental maps of their city with New Yorker's mental maps of New York.

Milgram published Obedience to Authority in 1974 and was awarded the annual social psychology award by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for his life's work but mostly for his work with obedience. He was also nominated for a National Book Award, in 1975, for his book which by this time had been translated into seven languages for international distribution.

1984 Stanley Milgram died in New York City in 1984. He was 51 years old.

http://www.stanleymilgram.com/
The life and works of Dr Stanley Milgram as presented by Dr Thomas Blass

About Edward de Bono

Edward de Bono was born in Malta in 1933. He attended St Edward's College, Malta, during World War II and then the University of Malta where he qualified in medicine. He proceeded, as a Rhodes Scholar, to Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained an honours degree in psychology and physiology and then a D.Phil in medicine. He also holds a Ph.D from Cambridge and an MD from the University of Malta. He has held appointments at the universities of Oxford, London, Cambridge and Harvard.

Dr Edward de Bono is one of the very few people in history who can be said to have had a major impact on the way we think. In many ways he could be said to be the best known thinker internationally.

He has written numerous books with translations into 34 languages (all the major languages plus Hebrew, Arabic, Bahasa, Urdu, Slovene, Turkish etc).

He has been invited to lecture in 52 countries around the world.

In the University of Buenos Aires five faculties use his books as required reading. In Venezuela, by law, all school children must spend an hour a week on his programmes. In Singapore 102 secondary schools use his work. In Malaysia the senior science schools have been using his work for ten years. In the U.S.A., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Republic of Ireland and the UK there are thousands of schools using Dr de Bono's programmes for the teaching of thinking. At the International Thinking Meeting in Boston (1992) He was given an award as a key pioneer in the direct teaching of thinking in schools.

In 1988 he was awarded the first Capire prize in Madrid for a significant contribution to humankind.

What is unique about Dr de Bono is the response to his work across an unusually wide spectrum.

At the special request of the delegates Dr de Bono was asked to address the Commonwealth Law Conference in Vancouver in August 1996 (2,300 senior lawyers, judges etc from 52 Commonwealth countries and other invited countries such as China). This followed an address which was regarded as the highlight of a previous Conference held in Auckland. Dr de Bono has worked with many of the major corporations in the world such as IBM, Du Pont, Prudential, AT&T, British Airways, British Coal, NTT(Japan), Ericsson(Sweden), Total(France), etc. The largest corporation in Europe, Siemens (370,000 employees) is teaching his work across the whole corporation, following Dr de Bono's talk to the senior management team. When Microsoft held their first ever marketing meeting, they invited Edward de Bono to give the keynote address in Seattle to the five hundred top managers.

Edward de Bono's special contribution has been to take the mystical subject of creativity and, for the first time in history, to put the subject on a solid basis. He has shown that creativity was a necessary behaviour in a self-organising information system. His key book, 'The Mechanism of Mind' was published in 1969. In it he showed how the nerve networks in the brain formed asymmetric patterns as the basis of perception. The leading physicist in the world, Professor Murray Gell Mann, said of this book that it was ten years ahead of mathematicians dealing with chaos theory, non-linear and self-organising systems.

From this basis, Edward de Bono developed the concept and tools of lateral thinking. What is so special is that instead of his work remaining hidden in academic texts he has made it practical and available to everyone, from five years olds to adults. The late Lord Mountbatten once invited Dr de Bono to talk to all his admirals. Dr de Bono was asked to open the first ever Pentagon meeting on Creativity. At the UN Social Summit in Copenhagen he was asked to address the banking and finance group.

The term 'lateral thinking' was introduced by Edward de Bono and is now so much part of the language that it is used equally in a physics lecture and in a television comedy.

Traditional thinking is to do with analysis, judgment and argument. In a stable world this was sufficient because it was enough to identify standard situations and to apply standard solutions. This is no longer so in a changing world where the standard solutions may not work.

http://www.edwdebono.com/debono/biograph.htm
The biography of Edward de Bono

About Evelyn Wood

Reading Dynamics is a discovery, not an invention. People have been reading rapidly for centuries. Nineteenth century economist John Stuart Mill complained he couldn't turn pages as fast as he could read them. Author H. L. Mencken could read a 250 page book in an hour. US President Theodore Roosevelt read 2 to 3 books a day while in office.

Evelyn Wood's discovery began when she was working on her Masters Degree at the University of Utah shortly after WW11. She submitted an 80 page term paper to her professor Dr. C. Lowell Lees and then watched in amazement as he read and graded it in less than ten minutes. His untrained reading rate: 2500 words per minute, yet he could not explain how he did it. Mrs. Wood, a school teacher, began to wonder if she could do the same thing and if there were others with similar skills. A two year search turned up some 50 people from all walks of life, teenagers to an eighty year old. They could read from 1500 to 6000 words per minute, and understand and remember what they had read. Analysing them she found they read more than one word at a time, seeing words in meaningful patterns, and moved their eyes quickly, smoothly, and easily down the page. They adjusted their speed to the type of material they were reading and knew how to find the thoughts in a paragraph, and the central idea in an article or book. "The purpose of reading," Mrs. Wood wrote, "is to get the information, feeling, and understanding the author is trying to convey. And, gauged by this purpose, these natural readers succeeded admirably."

Painstakingly Mrs. Wood began to teach herself these principles, until she was able to read several thousand words per minute, and along the way had developed a system for teaching others. Tested and proven at the University of Utah, in 1959 the first Institute was opened in Washington DC and the process was started that has altered forever the the way people learn from written sources. Since then the course has expanded throughout the United States, to Australia in 1968, and around the world.

http://www.evelynwood.com.au/#Discovery