Like the industry it serves, the world of maritime education and training is stuffed with buzzwords and catchphrases. Perhaps it’s time for everyone to pause, inhale and gaze beyond the jungle of acronyms like API (Academic Performance Index) and CBA (Competence Based Assessment). The following famous quotations talk about education, teachers and the learning process in a way that should inspire MET professionals as well as maritime students and seafarers.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. — William Butler Yeats

I have always had this view about the modern education system: we pay attention to brain development, but the development of warmheartedness we take for granted. — Dalai Lama

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding. — Ezra Pound

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Education is hanging around until you’ve caught on. — Robert Frost

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards. — Mark Twain

Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities. — William James

To insure safety at sea, the best that science can devise and that naval organization can provide must be regarded only as an aid, and never as a substitute for good seamanship, self-reliance, and sense of ultimate responsibility which are the first requisites in a seaman and naval officer. — Admiral Chester W. Nimitz

Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important. — Bill Gates

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards. — Anatole France

Acquire new knowledge whilst thinking over the old, and you may become a teacher of others. — Confucius

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. — John Steinbeck

The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful. — H.L. Mencken

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. — William Arthur Ward

It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid. — Albert Einstein

You need a teaching coach who understands the game of basketball, not just some guy coming on the court talking about Xs and Os. — Oscar Robertson

The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

The doer alone learneth. — Friedrich Nietzsche

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found time to conquer the world. — Heinrich Heine

It is easier for a tutor to command than to teach. — John Locke

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. — Aristotle

In the end we retain from our studies only that which we practically apply. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

~Barista Uno