I try not to post items like this without doing some thinking about the frame. (We're always thinking about the framing.) I could throw it up there and say, "one more depressing thing," and leave it at that.

And to a degree, the author of the item I'm about to post did that. He kept it straight right up until the end, when he wrote, with understandable exasperation:

What's depressing is the fact that this only took me 30 minutes to write, and you 2 minutes to read. Yet most people in the United States, including those in the media, the house of representatives, and probably even the Pentagon, lack even this cursory level of knowledge...

I don't want to do that. I don't want this to be a lamentation. Here's the piece. it's entitled What Every American Should Know About the Middle East. Given Senator McCain's recent high profile misstatement, and the general track record of of members of Congress and FBI employees tasked with carrying out the war on terrorism, this is a critical piece of information.

It covers the difference between Sunni and Shia, what we mean by "Arab" vs. "Muslim" and the like. I'm an Arab American, and I studied a lot about the history of Islam and the Arab world when I was in college, so I'm not really a solid measure of this.

But without lamenting our dumb world, I wonder how we got here. And if we're still getting more of the same.

When I was a kid, Shiite terrorists were a bad thing, too. Shiites in Iran took hostages and gave us the Islamic Republic of Iran and "Nightline". Shiites were at large across the Arab World causing mayhem, and were the bad guys of the Middle East bar none.

But I wasn't taught anything about the split in Islam that created the two strains after the death of Mohammed in high school. AP courses in history gave me as rich an understanding as possible (for a 17 year-old) of the underlying causes of the American Civil War, the Great Depression, and even the cultural divisions surrounding the US involvement in the Vietnam War. But nothing about the religious groups taking hostages and hijacking planes in the newspaper accounts throughout that turbulent period.

So I'm part of a generation that, without the intervention of a international studies degree, is quite unaware of the ethnic and religious differences inflaming many in the Middle East. The question I have is this: Is anyone doing anything about this for the next generation?

I hope so. There are definitely more opportunities available than when I (or Senator McCain) were in high school:

• The Asia Society's Education programs create opportunities for studies of other cultures.
  
• The Choices Program at Brown University has a rich curriculum that creates modules from current news items, and also puts students in the daunting but rewarding position of teaching their state representatives a thing or two about the world we share.
  
• CP-SS client World Learning is a leader in high quality, high road student exchange, perhaps the best way for people to learn these lessons.