ABSTRACT
Liberal arts colleges are special places. These communities of liberal learning ensure that their students are exposed to a diversity of ideas within and outside of the classroom. Communities of liberal learning are, social spaces where students can and do develop intimate and lasting social connections. The important role that liberal arts colleges can play in preparing students for political and civic life in a democracy has been recognized. The concept of social space was developed in the field of urban geography. This chapter focuses on how students interact with one another as well as college faculty and staff to produce an environment where meaningful social relations can and do occur. There were seven liberal arts, divided into the verbal arts, or the trivium, which included grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the mathematical arts, or the quadrivium, which included arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy.
