The discourse of aesthetics appears repeatedly throughout literature in art education and is employed frequently through K-12 classroom practice. This article discusses the use and uselessness of the discourse of aesthetics in art education. Discourse, as used in this article, refers to the specific term "aesthetics," and all the individual and institutional rules, codes, and conventions for thinking about, discussing, and experiencing aesthetics in art education--in things and in minds. Art educators use the discourse in part to refer to art, artistry, artistic choice, beauty, connoisseurship, creativity, experience, feeling, form, heightened awareness, judgment, meaning, meditation, perception, quality, refinement, reflection, senses, style, taste, and vision. Despite, or perhaps because of its innumerable application and bewildering character, many art educators deploy the discourse to generalize the complexity and richness of all human experiences and cultural products into a single referent--"aesthetics." This author contends that the discourse of aesthetics in art education conceals its history and disavows its politics through its tacit claim of transcendantal common sense and supreme value. He presents a brief history of aesthetics and explains why he considers the discourse of "aesthetic experience" in art education as a vehicle that serves specific social and political interests, while simultaneously masking those interests. He goes to to suggest that the challenge to art education today is to help students and teachers view, interpret, and respond to the world through a language ideally unfettered by the discourse of aesthetics, with all of its loaded categories, ideological baggage, and troubling taxonomies. (Contains 4 endnotes.)