When I first considered going to college I looked at many programs. The first thing I looked at from a monetary perspective was a local community college. My father and stepmother both worked there and so I could attend at no cost aside from books. While in the end this did not work out there was, a concept there that I think fosters a particular kind of learning that is worth sharing. This idea was labeled Learning Communities. The basic idea is to take two or more classes from different disciplines and teach them as a single class. The learning community I took part in was a combination of a 100 level English and philosophy class called Existential Philosophy. What I find truly lovely about learning communities is how they foster this idea of lifelong learning. By doing a cross discipline class one see the connections between math and philosophy or science and English. It is through this weaving of one discipline with another that we learn to identify in our lives where our knowledge and our world intersect. But community college was not the only place I looked at, and learning communities were not the only place I saw a strong tie to lifelong learning.Perhaps my favorite program when I was looking at school was a program called The Great Books. I looked at St. Johns of Annapolis not only because my father spent two years there but because the program itself appealed to me. Unfortunately, the school is also incredibly expensive and given my lack of dedication at the time to my education, I decided better of it. However, the Great Books program still appeals to me and I believe it says a lot about lifelong learning. The basic idea behind schools like St. Johns is that what we go to school initially for is not to learn something
