My recent focus for this internship has been diving into the origin of environmental education and how it has transformed throughout history. The importance behind this focus area of my internship is to fully understand the initial purpose of environmental education and what it has looked like historically, so that I can better understand how it needs to continue to progress in order to meet modern and future education goals. Interestingly, the idea of environmental education dates further back than one may expect.

The original emergence of the idea of environmental education can be traced back as early as the 18^th century. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Genevan philosopher, was the first to suggest the importance of education focused on the environment in Emile: or, On Education (Stanford 2010). Similarly, there was another famous scholar who had a crucial impact on the start of environmental education. Philosopher Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-born naturalist, mimicked Rousseau’s sentiments a century later and encouraged his students to study the natural world rather than books (Berkeley 1996). Agassiz was a known biologist and geologist of his time, and his philosophical views centered around a scientific perspective.