Having just spent the past four years getting a liberal arts degree it strikes me as ironic that I didn't know this...
"It's from Latin? Charlotte was the very picture of kind patience. "In Latin, liber means free? It also means book, but that's just a coincidence, I think. Anyway the Romans had slaves from all over the world, and some of the slaves were very bright, like the Greeks. The Romans would let the slaves get educated in all sorts of practical subjects, like math, like engineering so they could build things, like music so they could be entertainers? But only Roman citizens, the free people?- liber?- could take things like rhetoric and literature and history and theology and philosophy? Because they were the arts of persuasion - and they didn't want the slaves to learn how to present arguments that might inspire them to unite and rise up or something? So the 'liberal' arts are the arts of persuasion and they didn't want anybody but free citizens knowing how to persuade people."
(excerpted from Tom Wolfe's
I Am Charlotte Simmons - which, by the way, is a fantastic way to spend a weekend)
