The short stories of Guy de Maupassant are quite nice. Joseph Conrad's earlier works were once well-regarded, even if he is more famous for Heart of Darkness today. (My personal favorite is The End of the Tether, although I think he published that in the early 1900s.)

That's too bad... from a classical education perspective, there were some notable philosophers from the Middle East who built upon the Greek framework, like Al-Kindi, Avicenna, Averroes, and Al-Farabi. The West owes them a debt for preserving certain Greek works in Arabic that would have otherwise been lost.

Might there be many Seventh Day Adventists in your area? I get the impression that Adventists believe that maintaining a healthy body is part of the moral framework, because it means that one has resisted the temptations of sloth and gluttony. (https://www.adventist.org/vitality/health/) I could easily see people mixing up the positive and the negative; assuming that since someone with a healthy body is unlikely to be slothful or gluttonous, someone with an ill body must be slothful or gluttonous, even though there are many reasons a person might become ill that are unrelated to sloth or gluttony. :-/

Some works are actually better listened to than read, provided that the narrator is clear and professional. Poetry is almost always better heard aloud, since traditionally the entire point of poetry over prose was that it was easier to remember and be passed along orally. Speeches are almost always better heard aloud, because it allows the information to be experienced in a way that is closer to the original. This is especially true for speeches made in the past 100 years -- recording technology has made it possible to not only listen to the speech, but listen to the speech delivered by the original orator. For instance, here are two speeches from 1912 delivered by former American president Theodore Roosevelt: https://archive.org/details/theoroos1912 Plays are often better spoken, although not always. While the content and delivery is made clearer, some plays require some description of what is going on on-stage; ideally plays should be watched, but for plays that are mostly expository with limited action, audio can work quite well.

If it's not too far out of the way, perhaps a trip to Washington, D.C.?

Google Maps has some virtual tours of historic buildings; they might help with learning about period interiors: Here is one of Monticello in Virginia, USA -- keep zooming in, and it will eventually take you inside the house. The Palace of Versailles in France. The Castle de Fontainebleau in France. The White House in Washington DC, USA.

She might like Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, if she hasn't read it yet... or possibly something by Patricia A. McKillip?

I think that learning how to read a variety of cursive scripts is more important than one's writing abilities. There are many documents which are not important enough to the world in general to have a block script translation, but that are locally important; things like letters between great-grandparents, or captions on old photographs. Without training in cursive, those items would become unreadable.

For grammar, I think that a person can learn all they really need from two very short works, and one long one, provided that they are studied very carefully. First, George Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language", which does a very good job of explaining why exactly it is important to get into the nitty gritty, and provides the basics of how to do it. Second, E.B. White's revised version of William Strunk's Elements of Style. Although E.B. White is mostly known for his children's stories today, he was once famous for his very sharp writing in The New Yorker. Elements of Style is quite short, and focuses mostly on the "how" portion. It's worth carefully studying -- a person who has internalized its guidelines won't necessarily have any better ideas than they had before, but there will be very few barriers in the transfer of those ideas via text from one person to another. Third (and really only if the first two have left you unsatisfied), H.W. Fowler's The King's English. This is an older book, and deals with British English. It violates one of its own main rules through its age (to illustrate through living examples), but it explains in greater detail what George Orwell and Strunk & White were trying to say, and can be a valuable resource as long as the first two have been carefully digested first (to make it clear which parts are still useful, and which parts are now outdated.)

Is it just me, or does it seem like the STEM fields that pay the best are those that are involved in Boom-Bust cycles? (Petroleum engineering, computer programming, etc.) It makes sense, I suppose -- businesses that might normally be more comfortable playing the "wait until somebody cheaper comes along" game will lose out if they don't take advantage of the boom before it busts. I'd be interested in seeing how fields like that compare in the long-run to less well-paying but more stable fields.

If anybody is curious about the source, it is from the February 1938 issue of a magazine called CLICK. This was their first issue. The official title of the article was "Washouts: The Kind of Girls Men Won't Date". According to this pulp magazine collector (who also has some more scans from the issue), CLICK was sort of a tabloid journalism competitor to LIFE that went after more sensational subjects, things like "Peeping Toms: What Makes Them Peep?", "White Slavery: Details of the Suppressed League of Nations Report", "Civilized Savagery: Nazi Youths Revel in Blood", or their photo tour of a kosher beef slaughterhouse.

A few that might be helpful for American history before World War I: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is a nice slice of life, and helps add context to the face on the hundred dollar bills. :) The Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers are good for understanding what sort of concerns surrounded the Constitution. Letters from an American Farmer by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur captures the early enthusiasm quite well, and also points out the important distinction between those who wanted the U.S. to be a new experiment, and those who merely wanted it to be a New England, a philosophical divide still found today. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville is another good one. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery provide some helpful insights into the post Civil War period. Frederick Jackson Turner's The Frontier In American History was pretty influential in its day, although his version of history has been criticized by the historians that came after him. Read as part of a larger narrative it might help to show how the West was viewed then compared to how it is viewed now. How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis is nice for giving some visual context to the Gilded Age, maybe supplemented by Ida Tabell's History of the Standard Oil Company or Lincoln Steffens' Shame of the Cities. Also something like The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie and his Gospel of Wealth for the perspective from the other end.

Kudos to you for your honesty. I think one of the hardest things people struggle with is the potential they have within themselves to act in monstrous, evil ways. Many folks cope by simply denying the possibility -- they rationalize to themselves that only monsters and evil people can act monstrously and evilly, and that since they are neither a monster nor an evil person, there is nothing to struggle with, nothing to worry about.

Biography might help here. Find men and women whose lives you admired, and show how their actions and attitudes helped them turn into the people they became. Find people whose lives you think were tragic, and show how their actions and attitudes failed to help them overcome their struggles. Now, it isn't all down to action and belief -- different people are born under different circumstances, so the hand they start out with in life will also be different. It's also hard to predict how luck will influence outcomes -- sometimes people get things that they don't deserve, both bad and good. However, there is still a clear connection between how their own choices and beliefs influenced how they became the people that they became; if "don't be evil because the Bible says not to" doesn't work, one can always try, "here are people who acted in these ways -- these are the lives they lead, these are the ways that they died, and this is how they are remembered." Many great thinkers in the past have puzzled over the Bible; maybe their struggles will help you with your own?

For television news, I quite like NHK World.

Well, there has to be some balance here. Even if a person falls deeply in love with the Greeks and Romans, the market demand for Classics degrees is not large; a Classics degree may be a worthwhile purchase, but only if the money is already available to spend on it -- it will not pay for itself. A liberal education is one of the greatest gifts a parent can give their children growing up, because to be honest, they probably aren't all that "līber" in the larger scope of things. The temporary freedom as children that allows them to experience that education is bought through the hard work of their parents. In the U.S., at least, most citizens are landless; they owe rent to a landlord or mortgage to a bank who can evict or foreclose upon them when they are not paid regularly. University education gets more and more expensive each year, and many students can end up with large debts. When all that a person has to sell is their labor, the person who is willing to learn what the wealthy wish to purchase is the one who has a chance to escape their state and become a free land-owner. In general, these skills are not the liberal arts, but those that are "obnoxĭus" :) -- office skills, accounting, computer programming and engineering with an eye for business requirements, HR, logistics, sales and marketing, etc. I agree that it's important to warn about the "treadmill". In the 1950s in the U.S., the salaryman treadmill produced folks like Rabbit Angstrom from John Updike's "Rabbit, Run" or Sloan Wilson's "Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" -- people who were financially secure but desperately unhappy, and it is important to avoid that. On the other hand, I've noticed a lot more younger folks bitterly disillusioned after going through school following their passions only to learn that those passions would not make ends meet, such as those who wrote these letters to The Atlantic, not knowing how to reconcile the two states -- the free mind and the treadmill.

I'm finishing up Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, a great piece of biography with a lot of insight on how the attitudes a person adopts to survive in one environment can hinder them from flourishing in another. Next up will probably be Eric Hoffer's The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. I'm also working my way through the parts of the National Film Registry that are in the public domain... maybe that doesn't count as serious. :) I think my favorite so far is a movie from 1945 called Detour: I also quite liked A Trip Down Market Street -- who would have guessed at the time that simple scenes from the street in 1906 would be so interesting to watch 108 years later? :) (This was filmed right before the Great San Francisco Earthquake that destroyed most of the city.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz4AmeSApBE

Jazz on a Summer's Day (1960) is a nice one. It's a documentary about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. Maybe contrast and compare with Woodstock (1970), to show how the musical landscape changed?

The popularization and global spread of rap music might be an interesting topic. :) Maybe a segment on VHS and home recording in general, since these things caused significant changes in both how copyright law is viewed and how people entertain themselves. (Related to this, maybe a section on the invention and popularization of video games?) Bill Clinton's impeachment is probably worth mentioning, since impeachments have happened so rarely. Maybe a section on the National Narcotics Leadership Act of 1988 that created the ONDCP, and their "War on Drugs" effort. A segment on Japan's post-war revitalization and the influence of Japan on the global economy during the 1980s and 1990s might be interesting. The return of Hong Kong and Macau to China. The formation of the European Union. As has already been mentioned, AIDS, the internet, globalization of manufacturing, and the collapse of the USSR and its aftermath are all good subjects to consider as well.

Ultimately this is a very difficult question -- I know I certainly don't have all of the answers. If they choose not to tell you, it can indeed be hard to tell what is wrong, and of course many people when confronted by something that overwhelms them don't want to talk about it, because they don't want to re-experience those feelings. It may be possible to talk about it without talking about it, though, by talking about what they are struggling with in a way that is less personal, such as their reactions to a character in a book or play who is experiencing a similar struggle. Finding ways to add a degree of separation from their own feelings of being overwhelmed and the problem in general can help not only in identifying the problem but also in allowing themselves a space to work through it. For instance, the story of Faust, driven mad by his inability to know the things that mattered most to him despite a life dedicated to study, is less personal than confronting one's own feelings of despair in a similar situation. (On a more modern note, Stan Lee created Spider-Man in an effort to help teens work through their struggle between the capable people whom they were expected to be and the inadequate people they privately saw themselves as.) Exercise can help -- the focus on the physical takes one away from the mental and emotional. However, some people react to emotional strain with lethargy; in their case, channeling their minds into exercise might not work. However, given that Spring is here in many parts of the world, simply lying around in the sun instead of on the couch can have a positive effect. :) Allowing them to retreat temporarily into something that they are good at can help, even if it seems childish for their age. People are often demoralized when confronted by something that they feel has thwarted them, especially if their natural ability has allowed them to overcome most difficulties; reminding themselves that they still have control in some other aspect of their lives can help, as long as this avoidant attitude doesn't become permanent. Keep an eye out for negative coping, like self-harm. Self-harm uses the same principles of taking the mind away through the physical and re-establishing a feeling of control, but it does so in an unhealthy way. Whenever possible, try to replace the bad coping tools in their toolkit with good ones -- once certain habits have been established, they can be hard to break. I'm sure there are others out there with better advice than my own, and hope that they will also respond. :)

When a formerly single child gets a new baby sibling, they sometimes struggle with no longer being "the baby", and will try to act younger than their age. This is basically a small-scale version of the emotional struggle over growing old. When a pet fish dies, the tools a child uses to cope are really small-scale versions of the tools they will use years later when their spouse dies. In a perfect world, by the time each larger version of an issue comes along, the tools have already grown to scale through use on the smaller versions. In the weightroom, there is usually somebody who acts as a "spotter", someone who can help lift a heavy weight off of the lifter if their muscles fail them, so that they don't injure themselves in a panic trying to get the weight off. Often what gifted children need is an emotional spotter. The insight that allows gifted children to excel can sometimes get them into places that they do not have the tools to function in. In the same way that trying to lift a weight that is too heavy can lead to a muscle injury, trying to lift an existential weight that is too heavy can lead to an emotional injury. Rehabilitation in both cases involves artificially limiting the strain and providing rest, while gently working the muscle back into shape.

Another one that might be interesting, Daybreak in Udi, a 1949 film about colonial Nigeria (low resolution, sadly). It won an Oscar and a BAFTA award, I believe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYJBjxWN95U Also, The Living Stone, a 1958 documentary on the sculpting traditions of the Canadian Inuit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3R_7huyvy0

Would this work? A 1955 documentary on the Battle of Gettysburg, nominated for two Academy Awards: (Part 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byG8wb1Pwzo (Part 2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1FKwUIyn4M (Part 3) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkW7822UwaY

This is why emotional development must be pushed at the same rate as intellectual development -- otherwise their brains will allow them to see problems that their hearts have not yet provided them the tools to solve.

Taking the career prospects of a zoologist, an actuary, and a recording studio engineer, averaging them together and then trying to explain something about them all as a whole seems like an exercise in futility. :) Yet they'd all be considered "STEM graduates".