Liberal Arts Education - History

History

In classical antiquity, the "liberal arts" denoted those subjects of study that were considered essential for a free person (Latin: liber, "free") to master in order to acquire those qualities that distinguished a free person from slaves - the latter of whom formed the greater number of the population in the classical world. Contrary to popular belief, freeborn girls were as likely to receive formal education as boys, especially during the Roman Empire—unlike the lack of education, or purely manual/technical skills, proper to a slave. The "liberal arts" or "liberal pursuits" (Latin liberalia studia) were already so called in formal education during the Roman Empire; for example, Seneca the Younger discusses liberal arts in education from a critical Stoic point of view in Moral Epistle 88. The subjects that would become the standard "Liberal Arts" in Roman and Medieval times already comprised the basic curriculum in the enkuklios paideia or "education in a circle" of late Classical and Hellenistic Greece.

In the 5th century AD, Martianus Capella defined the seven Liberal Arts as: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. In the medieval Western university, the seven liberal arts were divided in two parts:

• the Trivium

1. grammar
2. logic
3. rhetoric

• the Quadrivium

4. arithmetic
5. geometry
6. music
7. astronomy, often called astrology; both modern senses were covered