I have proclaimed myself on this web site to be an “eternal student”, which means that I have an affinity for the ideals of learning and scholarship, even though I’m neither a student nor an academic scholar. Some people are sports fans; I’m a learning fan, a fan of academic prowess and advancement. Even if I’m not in the big leagues, I still like to participate as I can. So I read a lot, I look things up, think things thru, and write about them (mostly on this web site; I just can’t get myself together to write a big article or a book, as I’m just not ready for all the publisher rejection). But I’m not an “eternal student” as the term is mostly used on the Internet; it is generally a self-reference used by 20-somethings who are in grad school and don’t want to get out into the real world; or who do want to get out into the real world but aren’t having much luck.

People like me (i.e., old people; at least relative to the great majority of people using the web) are also called “life-long learners”. But I don’t like that term either. It sounds too quaint and too lame, sort of like “senior citizen”. Besides, when I say “eternal”, I really mean eternal. I believe that learning is something existentially profound, something with metaphysical bite to it, something that will still have meaning when our earth and our universe are no more. But aside from the ontological aspects, perhaps “learner” is a better term than “student”. Student is a passive word, whereby learner seems more active. A learner is a person who wants to learn, not someone forced to sit in a classroom. You can certainly be a student, in the modern sense, and not be a learner. In fact, the colleges and universities are filled with students whose main inspiration is getting a good job, and not learning and understanding important things about the world.

So maybe I should call myself an “eternal learner”. But hey, what’s in a name. What matters most is what you do in the world with your learning. I was reading the other day about an all-star “eternal learner and educator” from the past, and I thought I’d give him his due. His name was Alcuin, and he lived in Europe back in the 8th Century. Those days were known as the Dark Ages, and learning was a tough sell at the time; most people kept busy trying to avoid famine, plague, and roving vandals. But King Charlemagne decided that there was more to life than war and plundering in the name of the church, and so he decided to use the religious infrastructure of the time to spread learning throughout his kingdom (what we now know as Italy, France and Germany).

The religious infrastructure of affiliated monasteries was about the only infrastructure going at the time. So Charlemagne recruited Alcuin, a church deacon and scholar from England, to set up a school within Charlemagne’s court, and to follow up with a system to spread learning throughout the Frankish Kingdom. Before long, Charlemagne himself was taking classes. And priests were being trained and sent far and wide to work with the local monasteries to set up abbey schools, as to offer elementary education to both the nobles and the common folk.

Alcuin did a pretty good job in making education commonly available in Europe once again, setting up curriculums and teaching methods and tending to many bureaucratic issues. One of his contributions to the teaching of mathematics was the classic and often-hated practical math exercise. You know, the ones that go like this: “a man drives due east at 50 miles per hour, while from the same starting point his wife leaves 30 minutes later and drives due west at 40 miles per hour . . . ” Alcuin was interested and involved in many things, including theology, historical research, and the writing of poetry; he was a Renaissance man well before the Renaissance. His arguments for freedom of conscience helped to convince Charlemagne to abolish the death penalty for paganism.

Alcuin died in 804, and on his tombstone it says: “Alcuin my name, wisdom I always loved, Pray, reader, for my soul.” Alcuin thus assumed that he had an eternal soul, and that learning was at the root of its being. I’d like to think that he’s right, and that all true “eternal learners” like him never truly die.