The Healing Function and Institutional Construction of Aesthetic Education for the Elderly from the Perspective of Active Aging

As global population aging deepens continuously, a growing number of older adults experience inner spiritual emptiness, psychological imbalance, and weakened social interaction, which have become key obstacles restricting the effective implementation of active aging strategies. Compared with pharmacological therapies and professional psychological interventions that are limited by high access thresholds and inherent operational constraints, aesthetic education for senior citizens adopts immersive aesthetic experience and inclusive artistic practice as core carriers. It constructs a non-medical, daily, and sustainable intervention system for spiritual nourishment and psychological rehabilitation, which closely aligns with the core principles of health, participation, and security underpinning active aging. Based on an interdisciplinary research framework encompassing aesthetics, gerontological sociology, and health psychology, this study redefines the connotation of aesthetic healing for the elderly and distinguishes its essential differences from professional clinical art therapy. It further systematically elaborates four core healing dimensions, including emotional rehabilitation, cognitive maintenance, social bond reconstruction, and life value reshaping. By analyzing multiple practical scenarios involving visual arts, performing arts, digital aesthetic education, and community-rooted aesthetic services, this paper empirically verifies the positive effects of aesthetic education on relieving seniors' negative emotions, slowing cognitive deterioration, and alleviating social isolation. Targeting prominent industry bottlenecks including inadequate age-friendly curriculum design, insufficient professional teaching talent, and unbalanced urban-rural resource distribution, this research proposes a comprehensive institutional development framework from four perspectives: curriculum optimization, teacher team construction, multi-party collaborative guarantee, and inclusive balanced development. This study aims to transform scattered exploratory practices of senior aesthetic education into standardized, popularized, and high-quality public services, empower the spiritual health of aging populations via aesthetic education, and provide practical support for the national strategic deployment of actively addressing population aging.