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A liberal education is a system or course of education suitable for the cultivation of a free (Latin: liber) human being.It is based on the medieval concept of the liberal arts or, more commonly now, the liberalism of the Age of Enlightenment. [1]
French revolutionaries in the 1790s began an intellectual awakening called the Enlightenment, which opened the door for ideas of positivism in Latin American society and people in Latin America turned to liberal ideologies as liberalism means the idea of liberty, equality and popular sovereignty.
Liberalism viewed universal, free, secular education as the means to transform Mexico's citizenry. Early nineteenth-century liberals promoted the idea of economic development in the overwhelmingly rural country where much land was owned by the Catholic Church and held in common by indigenous communities to create a large class of yeoman farmers .
As Blinkhorn argues, the liberal themes were ascendant in terms of "cultural pluralism, religious and ethnic toleration, national self-determination, free market economics, representative and responsible government, free trade, unionism, and the peaceful settlement of international disputes through a new body, the League of Nations".
Freedom, according to classical liberals, was maximised when the government took a "hands off" attitude toward the economy. [54] Historian Kathleen G. Donohue argues: [A]t the center of classical liberal theory [in Europe] was the idea of laissez-faire.
Liberal philosopher Thomas Hill Green began to espouse a more interventionist government approach. Green's definition of liberty, influenced by Joseph Priestley and Josiah Warren, was that the individual ought to be free to do as he wishes unless he harms others. [67] Mill was also an early proponent of feminism.
The importance of education to the liberal project is indicated in Article 3 of the Constitution of 1857 embedding education as a top goal. Only after the turmoil of the Reform War and then the French Intervention were liberals able to begin implementing the expansion of public education.
Thomas Hobbes (England, 1588–1679) theorized that government is the result of individual actions and human traits, and that it was motivated primarily by "interest", a term which would become crucial in the development of a liberal theory of government and political economy, since it is the foundation of the idea that individuals can be self ...