The Radical Experiment That Taught the World to Think
Long before online learning and AI tutors, a Los Angeles college without classrooms quietly reinvented education. Its boldest project—run by Michael Hewitt-Gleeson and Edward de Bono—taught 40,000 hospital workers how to think better. It worked.
The College With No Campus
In 1970, International College launched in Los Angeles with an idea so radical it almost sounded medieval: one student, one tutor, one mission. No departments. No lecture halls. Just pure intellectual apprenticeship.
Each scholar worked directly with a mentor to design a bespoke project—real-world, measurable, and original. It was a university without walls, long before the internet made that phrase fashionable.
Turning Creativity Into Code
Among its boldest experiments was the partnership between Dr Edward de Bono, inventor of Lateral Thinking, and Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson, an Australian systems thinker who turned creativity into data, code, and algorithms.
Together, they conducted one of the first large-scale cognitive-training experiments: 26 New York hospitals, 40,000 participants, and a single question—could thinking itself be improved through structured practice?
The answer was yes. Thinking could be taught, measured, and improved.
The project’s measurable success proved that cognition wasn’t a mystery—it was a design problem.
When Thinking Went Global
Their work culminated in the 1982 book Learn-To-Think: Coursebook and Instructor’s Manual—a step-by-step guide for teaching creativity and logic as trainable skills. A year later, the coursebook became a global sensation when Reader’s Digest featured it in a cover story—“Seven Steps to Better Thinking”—across all international editions, reaching 68 million readers worldwide.
The Legacy
Though International College closed in 1986, its DNA thrives in modern education: mentorship-based PhDs, design thinking, and cognitive coaching.
The Hewitt-Gleeson–de Bono collaboration proved that serious scholarship doesn’t need ivory towers—just imagination, autonomy, and applied rigour. In an age shaped by algorithms and artificial intelligence, their insight feels prophetic:
Human cognition isn’t fixed. It’s upgradable.
The most powerful classroom isn’t a campus. It’s the mind.
Reference: Academic Paper: A College Without Walls
© 2025 Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson de Saint-Arnaud. All rights reserved.
