Why do educators need to ask Hamlet's question?

Abstract

This article is a procedure that we use to address the relevance of appropriating literary aesthetic works in performance and research in Education. We start from the contributions of the Lukacsian ontological perspective and, also, the elaborations of the historical-critical pedagogy, to explore the potential of great art in the debate in education. We consider the ontological and historical perspective of the constitution and social function of the work of art and advance towards its realistic potential in terms of the educational phenomenon, taking Shakespeare's classic “Hamlet” as a contribution. We conclude that the Arts provide a type of knowledge that allows understanding essential aspects of objective reality and, in this respect, needs to be appropriated and transmitted through the teleologically oriented activity of educators and educational researchers.