Is it? What country's educational system is this coming from? The history of the First World War was an enormous part of the teaching of History in my school years in the UK, as was the poetry of the war in English lessons. Just this week a (somewhat uninformed, but hardly overlooked) comment about the First World War was the highest-rated comment in an /r/askreddit thread about which war was the worst for the common soldier, and this is an American-dominated website. Armistice Day is an incredibly important day of remembrance in Commonwealth countries, and the Centenary of the war has been publicly marked here in Britain. If the First World War seems under-represented in popular culture, it is because the great stereotype of futile charges against wire and machine guns does not make for good cinema, and a general lack of understanding of what it was all for makes for less-sympathetic storylines than the easily-understandable fight against Nazism in Second World War films. Despite this, off the top of my head I can think of three films and books about the First World War - Private Peaceful, War Horse, and Our World War - released relatively recently that continue to shape our perceptions of the conflict. It is hardly overlooked.