College or university curriculum aimed at imparting general knowledge and developing general intellectual capacities, in contrast to a professional, vocational, or technical curriculum.
In Classical antiquity, the term designated the education proper to a freeman (Latin liber , "free") as opposed to a slave. In the medieval Western university, the seven liberal arts were grammar, rhetoric, and logic (the trivium ) and geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy (the quadrivium ). In modern colleges and universities, the liberal arts include the study of literature, languages, philosophy, history, mathematics, and science.