Charlotte looked at him in a teacherly fashion. “You know what ‘liberal arts’ means?”
Pause. Rumination. “…No.”
“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.”
-Tom Wolfe “I am Charlotte Simmons”
