ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the education and teaching of landscape-related subjects in relation to the development of the study of landscape in the Western world. Geography, biology and history became core subjects and ‘direct field observation’ was an essential new method to explore the local environment. The collapse of the status of geography in Europe, in particular in Germany since the Second World War, led also to the decline of Landschaftskunde, which lost its societal significance as a the discipline. The European Landscape Convention considers landscape a basic component of the European natural and cultural heritage that consolidates the European identity. The empirical study of the landscape started with the systematic descriptions during the naturalistic explorations of the 18th and 19th centuries. In these early days of natural sciences, the distinction between different disciplines was vague; the approach holistic and methods were mostly descriptive.
