BY DEFINITION: There seems to be some confusion on the Web about who is an “eternal student” and what it means to be one. As to relieve some of that confusion, or at least acknowledge it, I propose the following dictionary definition:

E • ter • nal Stu • dent • dom 1.) The state that young grad students often find themselves in when it seems to take forever to get their classes finished and get a grip on their thesis. This state relates to the state of despair, especially when the graduate student is married and has a child and sees his or her friends with regular jobs buying houses and taking vacation trips while the “eternal” graduate student suffers relative deprivation because of the high cost of postgraduate education these days. However, this form of eternal studentdom eventually comes to an end when the grad student finally gets the doctorate and finds a job, or gives up and becomes a stockbroker or something. 2.) The state that certain older people, who are long out of college, find themselves in when they look back and realize that their college and/or graduate school days were probably the best days of their lives, and then realize that the spirit of those times can be continued despite the lack of teachers and classrooms and registrars offices about them. I.e., the older “eternal student” dedicates him or herself to continuing study, mostly self-guided but sometimes in conjunction with others, occasionally utilizing formal curricula but mostly improvised, by continuing their readings in selected topics of interest; by writing and thinking and discussing what they’ve learned, challenging the accepted paradigms of the chosen field of learning, and by maintaining their curiosity and thirst for greater understanding and wisdom. Some observers relate this condition to pre-operational delay theory, contending that “eternal student” types had, as children, stalled neurologically at Piaget’s pre-operational stage of cognitive development, where much of information processing is at a holistic-visual level and is largely musical and non-verbal, and there is not yet a decentralization from egocentrism. In other words, because of some glitch in childhood mental development, some people arguably want to stay in school and learn, and forget about the joys of wheeling and dealing as adults in society. Either because such people are egocentric, or because learning has a musical quality to it.

Obviously, this blog and the person behind it — sweet, wonderful me — have everything to do with the second definition and nothing to do with the first. As to Piaget and pre-operational developmental delays, I don’t necessarily agree. But even if so, then so what? It takes all kinds to run this world. We need wheelers and dealers and we also need eternal students. If we can all work together and share our strengths to fill in for our weaknesses, then the world could be a better place.