This article analyses some initiatives taken to implement education of the professional in the context of state policies in Minas Gerais at the end of the 19th, and in the beginning of the 20th, century. Our aim is to understand how the schooling of workers from Minas Gerais was conceptualized and built into the schooling system, at this time, and how this relates to a modernizing educational ideal for the Republic and its related production processes. The analysis of the document - Annals of the Congress of Minas Gerais, Laws and Decrees - produced between the years,1892 and 1911, allows us to see the effort made by the elites of Minas Gerais, to, not only qualify the workers, but also to teach them a work ethic. As part of a larger process, that tried to answer to the ideal of "order and progress" aspired to by the republican elites, these state policies for vocational education intended to shape workers, as well as including them, as useful citizens, in the newly inaugurated republic.
State Policies; Elementary Technical School; Training; Vocational Education; Professional Development