Liberal arts are the skills derived from the Classical education curriculum. The term liberal arts denotes a curriculum that imparts general knowledge and develops the student’s rational thought and intellectual capabilities[vague], unlike the professional, vocational, technical curricula emphasizing specialization. The contemporary liberal arts comprise studying literature, languages, philosophy, history, mathematics, and science.

In classical antiquity, the liberal arts denoted the education proper to a free man (Latin: liber, “free”), unlike the education proper to a slave. In the 5th Century AD, Martianus Capella academically defined the seven Liberal Arts as: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. In the medieval Western university, the seven liberal arts were: The liberal arts include the visual arts.

Renaissance supporters of the visual arts — architecture, painting, sculpture, classed as mechanical and manual arts — argued their inclusion to the liberal arts; among said advocates were Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, and Giorgio Vasari. In Italy, and among Renaissance humanists, the academic matter was decided around 1500, yet it required another century in Spain and England. In the United States, Liberal arts colleges are schools emphasising undergraduate study in the liberal arts.

A full-time, four-year course of study earns the student either a Bachelor of Arts degree or a Bachelor of Science degree; on completing undergraduate study, students might progress to either a graduate school or a professional school (public administration, business, law, medicine, theology). The teaching is Socratic, to small classes, and at a greater teacher-to-student ratio than at universities; professors teaching classes are allowed to concentrate more on their teaching responsibilities than primary research professors or graduate student teaching assistants, in contrast to the instruction common in universities. Despite the European origin of the liberal arts college, the term liberal arts college usually denotes liberal arts colleges in the United States.

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