This essay attempts to examine the concept 'working body' and develop a critical reflection about the educational principle of aesthetics and the origin of artistic knowledge, understood in Marxist theory as a contribution to the studies developed in the areas of Work and Education. In our view, these studies fail to consider the aesthetical issue as one of the elements in the cultural history of the worker. On the basis of this analysis, the text presents the main ideological demands and conceptual changes of the bourgeois teleology of art and of the teaching of art in Brazil in the official documents of the most recent Brazilian legislation on education.
working body; aesthetical education; post-modernity; Brazilian art; teaching of art