DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Fighting for the value of that which is not immediately useful.

   

Since my freshman year at Notre Dame, I have had to defend my primary major, the Program of Liberal Studies, from family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers alike.  Why would I go to a school like Notre Dame and study "arts and crafts"?  This is precisely why I decided to make the value of a liberal arts education the topic of my multimedia course's final project.  It is sometimes difficult to explain the sort of soft skills that I have gained over my four years at Notre Dame without subjecting my major to the same utilitarian framework against which Dr. Joseph Rosenberg spoke in the video.  In truth, I became a PLS major because I wanted to learn, and my experience within the major facilitated not just my love of learning but also my mental, emotional, and psychological growth.  Being exposed to the Great Books has changed me in ways that I could not have forseen but for which I am deeply grateful.  I wanted to give the leaders of our small PLS community the chance to explain PLS and its value.

   

The summer after I created this video, I interned with Pearson and completed a project about employability and efficacy.  Throughout the course of my research, I found that employers are hiring more liberal arts students than they have in the past five to ten years.  Consequently, the offer rates for business majors that have consistently received the most offers are now going down.  As it turns out, employers are looking for the soft skills that we "arts and crafts" majors cultivate over years of seminar-style classes that focus on communicating, writing, debating, and synthesizing large amounts of information.  My "Fighting for the Liberal Arts" video may have predated my employability project, but both of them lead to the same conclusion: the liberal arts are more important now than ever in our utilitarian society bound up in apathy.  We must recultivate the love of learning.

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

 


Click screenshot to go to the Flickr page.

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.