Landscape Education, Enskilment, and Aesthetics: Complex Skills for Our Time

Environmental education is undoubtedly a pressing need in our time. Landscape education may be seen as something more restricted in scope and necessity, and more disengaged. However, as I will first argue, because of the intrinsically concrete, localized, aesthetic character of landscapes in their difference from environment, landscape education in fact can also be seen as a more complex and challenging concept that can be framed in terms of enskilment. Second, to better clarify this concept and highlight the theoretical and practical difficulties related to it, this paper will then turn to some Wittgensteinian ideas about learning, especially his concept of Abrichtung, which has been proposed to be “ecologically” translated as ‘enskilment.’ Third, in the last section, the paper will emphasize the centrality of aesthetics, conceived of in a pragmatic and engaged fashion, in the task of landscape education. Through a brief discussion of two main patterns of games, the paper will finally lay claim to the concrete and topical value of an adequately conceived aesthetic education to landscape.