"Art reflects life" embodies the ideological nature of art, which is a special form of reflecting real life after all. Huang Zongxi, a writer in the early Qing Dynasty, said: "Poetry has a wide range of ways, and a person's temperament and chaos in the world are all hidden." It shows that art reflects the objective world, or the objective social relations and the objective process of history, and also reflects people's subjective world-people's thoughts, feelings, emotions and so on. Any field in the universe and life that becomes the object of human activities can be the object of artistic description, so it can be embodied in art in different ways. In realistic narrative works, not only the essential laws of life are profoundly revealed, but also the existing forms of life are described as truly as possible. This not only provides people with aesthetic value, but also provides a kind of value close to historical documents, so that future generations can appreciate it from an aesthetic point of view, and can also study and appreciate it from historical, economic, folk-custom or other angles. Marx and Engels praised the great achievements of critical realism masters such as Dickens and Balzac from aesthetic and moral perspectives. Similarly, we can also guide students to appreciate or learn from the perspective of aesthetics, history and folklore. If you appreciate Zhang Zeduan's The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival, you can not only appreciate the aesthetics, but also understand the life of Kaifeng people more than 1000 years ago. Romantic art can not provide a faithful description of the appearance of objective life like realism, but it can provide people with a vivid expression of people's ideals, fantasies and passions in an era. It can also enlighten the viewer with knowledge and wisdom.

No matter what artistic method, genre and style works are, no matter how grotesque, they all have their corresponding realistic basis, so they must reflect some characteristics of real life in different ways and show some aspects of the artist's spiritual world, so they have different cognitive values. Through school aesthetic education activities, students are guided to expand their thinking and understanding of nature, society and life in aesthetics and enrich their knowledge.