Education of Senior Citizens on their Health and Wellness
The SAGE, standing for Silver AGE Learning, is the new educational research project (2019-1-CZ01-KA204-061165) co-funded by EU Erasmus+ programme with support from the European Commission. Its aim is to develop an innovative education system for seniors, which will bridge the gap between Universities of the Third Age and free-time academies, offering new educational opportunities to the elderly in community-based settings and homes for seniors.
Education should play an important role in all stages of human life and it is true for senior age as well. It can help prepare people for their old age and contribute significantly to making the old age more enjoyable, more dignified and more independent. Stretching the self-sufficiency period of the elderly citizens will have a profound positive impact on the whole society, not just the seniors.
To address the need for providing high quality education to the elderly our transnational SAGE partnership set out to develop an innovative education program for seniors. The new program will be able to deliver not only immediate goals of mastering the training topics, but also - and even more significantly - to contribute to overall well-being of participants by stimulating their social and spiritual activity. The training portfolio will address the subjects of physical well-being, spiritual well-being, social involvement and personal task management of day-to-day living of the elderly. When completed in June 2022 the new education program will be covered in 150 hours of classroom instruction.
Participation of seniors in the new education program will help them to cope with issues associated with their age and will contribute to extending the period of their self-sufficiency. Our dissemination efforts will foster utilization of the program by peer adult education organizations and will hopefully lead to general acceptance of the need to increase the quality of education delivered to seniors, especially with regard to monitoring and evaluation of actual training outcomes.