Liberal education means or has always meant an education whose purpose it is to develop academic interests in the individual. Its function has been intellectualistic, and its acquisition led to careers which required the use of speculative or abstract intelligence, and remoteness from physical and mechanical reality.

Brazil with an area of 9,000,000 square kilometers is a country with a low density of population and a great variety of physical and social resources.

Education in Brazil reflects all the changes through which the country has passed. A colony of Portugal until 1822, Brazil during the whole period had an educational system modeled on that of the mother country. Higher education in Portugal was given by the Jesuits until the middle of the eighteenth century. It was not until the third quarter of that century, in 1773, that the Marquis of Pombal, after the expulsion of the order, created a system of elementary education under the state and developed secondary and higher education.