Can America Win Space?; Black History Month in 2021; US Critical Thinking Crisis | The Nation Speaks

[Music] today on the nation speaks space can america win the final frontier in the history of black history month and thinking critically about critical thinking hello and welcome to the nation speaks i'm your host cindy drew care to me space is endlessly fascinating all of it exploration commerce tourism and even i'll admit it warfare this week nasa's perseverance rover landed on mars after about six months and nearly 300 million miles today we're gonna go deep into space and we have three guests to help us get there first we're going to look at the most pressing question why does america have a space force what are the threats and are we ready to face them and joining us now is brandon weikert he's the founder of the wyckert report an online journal of geopolitics and the author of the recent book winning space how america remains a superpower brandon welcome thank you for having me so i have so many questions um but you open your book with a description of space pearl harbor and it takes place in 2022 which is next year so it's a little a little scary perhaps there's a lot to discuss there but perhaps you can start by just painting the picture for our audience yeah so basically the united states relies on satellites to do just about everything i mean everything from military operations to basic financial transactions and those satellites are precariously vulnerable to foreign attack and disruption and our enemies know it and china and russia both in particular have been crafting what are known as counter space capabilities that is the ability to target and attack uh those satellite systems at relative low cost to them in order to stymie an american military response to something that they may be planning to do for russia it may be an attack in the baltic states and for uh china it could very well be an attack on taiwan or somewhere in the south or east china sea this is all part of the uh asymmetrical warfare unconventional warfare doctrine that we've seen pretty much all of america's enemies uh developing over the last 20 years and as a means of overcoming america's overwhelming traditional or conventional military power and so how do you imagine that they're taking out u.s satellites right so both russia in particular but also china has started doing uh the construction of these small fast-moving hard to track satellites with grappling claws they're called in the military community uh space stalkers the russians call them estribitel sputnikov the chinese i don't know what the name is for the chinese version but they are developing them as well and basically these systems are designed to be put in orbit and they tailgate our larger sensitive military communications nuclear command and control satellites and they basically stay dormant until given a command and once they're activated they basically speed up latch onto a particular satellite and physically push it out of orbit and that basically denies the americans the ability to communicate and coordinate a defense of say the baltic states from russia or a defense of taiwan from china and it also uh makes our ability to respond with nuclear weapons if they target our nuclear command and control capabilities which is something we know the russians in particular have done all of our forces rely on this integrated approach to war fighting um and and that is all brought about thanks to the satellites that we have in orbit and once you remove those satellites and really you only have to remove a handful of them once you remove those satellites you've rendered american forces deaf dumb and blind and you could do it within about half an hour and that technology is proven it exists right now yeah yeah so like i said in particular the russians have spent the last five years deploying these systems uh we we heard in 2016 or 17 about the so-called nesting doll satellite basically the russians launched what they claimed was a routine satellite into orbit and as it turned out it opened up and a smaller satellite came out and then from that satellite a smaller satellite came out and that was a proof of concept the russians were demonstrating in orbit that they could in fact not only deploy these systems but they could also do them rapidly from space not just from from the earth to space but from space itself and russia has been developing multiple systems like that uh in november of last year uh when china tested its unmanned reusable vehicle uh as it was returning to the earth a secondary object was deployed from its cargo bay and norad tracked that orbit it was not debris it has a an orbit of its own and i believe it is a space stalker similar to what the russians have been deploying for the last five years sounds like the old russian dolls technology yeah that's exactly right yeah that's exactly right um so let me ask you this are all the relevant departments in the us government aware of this let me put this another way one of the reasons pearl harbor was so devastating is because it was a surprise attack the government was not expecting it is that the case here well as i point out in the book roberta wallstedter kind of argues with that in fact we were receiving similar to how 911 happened disparate elements of u.s intelligence were receiving uh threat indicators coming from japan we just didn't know for sure that they were going to attack pearl harbor it was a failure to believe we didn't believe the japanese could use really what was cutting edge aircraft carrier technology at the time in such an effective way so far removed from their own shores similarly today we do receive inputs like i said norad and us intelligence we know about the estributal sputnikov we know about chinese counter space attempts like their development of lasers to blind uh american satellites passing over their territory over the south china sea and yet we've not really done much at a coordinated level to sort of bring together all the tools of statecraft to uh deny the chinese and russians this advantage we did under the trump administration create space force of which i was happily a part of unfortunately though it remains to be seen if the new biden administration will continue to develop this most needed uh branch of the military the space force jen sackey's comments a few weeks ago certainly gave uh cause for concern among myself and other space power advocates and also there have been uh successive uh comments by people within the biden foreign policy team indicating that they don't really believe in this concept of us space power that it's too nationalistic too trumpian that it's it's it's not forward thinking enough they'd rather cooperate in space rather than compete in space and of course our enemies they get a vote in this too and they simply don't see it that way notably china in the long run does not have a cooperative view of space policy and the russians for their part don't as well in fact a colleague of mine at the pentagon emailed me today with the article about how china and russia just announced the development of a joint project to build a research outpost together in the lunar poll of of the moon the southern pole of the moon and that would be a game changer because alone china and russia are problems that we can handle but once they start fusing together notably in the high-tech sector notably in space now you have the number two and number three space power russia and china respectively competing against the number one space power in the united states that really isn't doing as much as it should be doing as much as it could be doing in space wow that's really disturbing so if the u.s government takes it as seriously as you think they need to and they kicked it into high gear how long do you think it would take to be able to neutralize the level of threat that you're talking about and could they can they still yeah that's the problem is is in space warfare every minute you delay basically gives an hour uh you know for your enemy to do something and so we've delayed a lot of the necessary reforms even trump's creation of the space force this was something that donald rumsfeld was talking about in his uh uh confirmation hearing as secretary of defense in 2001 they never did it what we really need i would argue i think the space force they have a 15 billion dollar budget that's a joke we should be in meshing morse private space startups to uh sort of speed up and leapfrog whatever advances our enemies have made america's greatest advantage right now remains its true private sector so we can do more at much less cost in space and that's the trick okay great so you just answered a bunch of things i was curious about so let me jump on the last thing that you said you argue in the book that whoever creates the the cheaper way to get to space wins so are we at an advantage because of the private public sector or is that a disadvantage because a centralized you know command economy can get anything done well well that's a great question so the chinese right now have a weakness and that is elon musk is kicking their butts in uh the reusable launch services sector we know that china views this as a strategic threat which is why they're dumping all this money into building out their own reusable uh launch vehicle system and so right now because of elon musk for the last eight years really musk has lowered launch costs for military satellite launches by about 40 percent if he can get his reusable rockets going for nasa which there's some pushback from nasa they don't like for instance the starship design that could potentially take humans to mars but if if he can get also nasa to embrace his reusable launch concepts we're talking about creating massive uh uh cost effectiveness uh the problem has been the bureaucracy at first the air force did not want to trust its crown jewels these satellites that it uses for surveillance and communication and nuclear command they didn't want to trust it to an unproven reusable rocket but ultimately because of the russian invasion of crimea uh the lockheed and boeing united launch alliance could not be used as much because their rockets were the rd-180 russian engines and the russians were threatening to basically sanction those those engines so we wouldn't be able to get our satellites into orbit so they started using elon musk elon musk has slashed that that that cost and in turn has allowed for the pentagon to start innovating and creating new projects what china's able to do is a little bit different they're able to take the centrally central authority and they're able to to forcefully fuse their private sector and their public sector and they're able to throw a bunch of chinese taxpayer money at a given problem and they've identified space as something they want to conquer and so they recognize that while there are these great decentralized innovations like spacex happening in the united states there's been a very small amount of concerted effort to bring those those efforts up from the musk side of the private sector into the military into the government nasa side what china's trying to do is do that all up front right now and so that's the problem that we're facing is there's not enough buy-in from american policy makers at least in the biden administration to really catapult ourselves ahead of the chinese in space the chinese and the russians on the other hand have a very state capitalist model which has a lot of drawbacks but when they want to focus on one primary goal such as space dominance especially if those two countries fuse their space programs together as it looks like they might be doing now you're talking a different ball game i have 25 more questions to ask you but we're out of time maybe you can come back another time i would love to all right thank you so much brandon thank you okay fortunately most of us don't need to think about winning a space war but we might want to think about living or working in space at least that's what our next next guest thinks about a lot joining us now is dale skran he's the ceo of the national space society dale welcome thank you i'm glad to be here so the national space society as i understand it is a space advocacy group made up of visionaries and thought leaders is that accurate well that's certainly true we're the leading citizen group advocating a spacefaring civilization and we we actually include people from all walks of life we're not a professional group or a citizen group okay so speaking about our future in space i know that you and you can let me know if it's an nss position that um for the human species to survive we need to settle other planets we need to settle in space can you explain that to us why is that your thinking we really believe that the resources of space are needed to provide a rich future for all of humanity and not just people in the developed countries but everybody in the entire world all those billions of people who live in grinding poverty today and we'll talk more about that later i think but we believe that solar power in space can provide unlimited energy to the earth and also that within the asteroids there are virtually unlimited material resources so i think that's to us that's the first step and we often say that uh space development should precede space settlement so beyond that that very important goal of of providing a rich and growing future for everybody on earth not just for an elite in the developed nations um we believe that space settlement is essential to the long-term survival of humanity um there's a couple of aspects to this uh one is that the earth is a relatively fragile and very variable environment and there are things like super volcanoes there are coronal mass ejections from the sun there are asteroid impacts there's natural climate change and you know there have been i think five or six great extinctions in earth's history in which most species died out or very a very high percentage of the species died out some of them were much worse than others um and that there's a tendency i think for people to say that well you know humans and earth perfect together but it's it's more accurate to say that humans have evolved to fit well on earth that's not to say that earth is a particularly friendly place viewed over a deeper span of time i'm in new jersey right now we've just had about a flood of snow and the temperatures outside are subfreezing if i were wandering around you know wearing my underwear how long would i last i don't think that would last more than a few hours there's also the human risks things like nuclear war human-caused climate change not to be confused with natural climate change runaway ais artificial diseases and you could make a longer list and there's also the fact that people often sometimes think about this in terms of like one disaster at a time but in reality they might come together in a kind of one-two punch it's like an asteroid hits moscow the russian army decides a few missiles of europe then pakistan and india decide they're going to have a nuclear war at that point and when it's all said and done we're basically all dead so you know that we think these are very real threats so so is it a commonly held view in the space community that ultimately we're going to need to settle on other planets for the species to survive well that question requires a bit of an answer it's a key motivator for many famous leaders people like physicist freeman dyson recently deceased and a member of our board of governors uh people like stephen hawking also recently deceased a very famous physicist and carl sagan all of these people believe very strongly that the only long-term hope humanity had was to settle space and these are some of the smartest people who've ever lived even people that are are less known for their opinions like michael griffin the former nasa administrator believed that the long-term future of humanity uh it was required space settlement it's also a key motivator for people like uh uh bezos and musk uh you know i think the number one and number two the richest people right now and also two people who are spending as much of their money as they can moving into space so i i think it you know so it's pretty widely held in that sense it's it's it's viewed as a long-term outcome by astronauts and others involved in space even if it's not immediate so the way i kind of summarize it is there's people who want to settle space right now which includes people like musk and many in the nss there's people who work towards it but see it kind of more in the long term including some nss members then there's some skeptics or people like louis friedman the founder of the planetary society who sees settlement was only being on mars he had a very narrow view of settlement but he still thought mars should be settled and then there's a small group that actively opposed space settlement and so what how do you imagine this settlement happening you know for when we talk about jamestown or plymouth it took you know a couple of hundred years to go from something you know very primitive and shaky in terms of you know sustaining life to thriving cities fed by abundant agriculture so are you picturing it's that kind of trajectory or is it more like resource outposts like you know living in a you know a mining town you know that's basically just existing for that i see it a little differently and and this is my personal opinion i see it more like the dispersal out of africa um you know when the human species was really at one point a very small number of individuals in africa and they basically spread over the entire world sort of one canoe at a time uh all the way along the border of africa the border of asia out to australia into europe and all that the u.s frontier is not the perfect analogy space is unpopulated there's not likely to be the kind of colonial horrors that are sometimes evoked i see we see development first led by robots with humans following the the their remote oil tones aren't settlements they might exist they probably will exist but that's not our goal a settlement is is a community people with their families living working planning on spending their lives there and so how do you see the role of government and private sector in this vision government should enable not bill we're not looking to see hud in space um or a big government project where nasa builds something on the moon that is definitely not what we're looking for but government's essential uh programs like commercial resupply the iss is a great example of a public-private partnership leading to a leading the way to a commercial future in space the commercial lunar payload services to use commercial rockets to land scientific payloads on the moon and the commercial human landers which i think are very exciting technically um those are the kind of things nasa needs to do more of and so when it comes to the space-based space-based resources you mentioned solar and a few other things what is it that excites you most what do you think that most people don't know about that's really exciting that's out there well i think i think the thing that people don't know about is is space-based solar power it's been around for a long time and a lot of people have formed negative opinions based on work that was done in the field 20 or 30 years ago the the technology has advanced dramatically it's really really possible to do right now the other thing that people don't appreciate is that water in space is is a really key thing water on the moon water on mars water in the asteroids water will probably end up being the universal cost-effective fuel you can split it into hydrogen and oxygen and use it as a chemical fuel or you can just heat it in a nuclear reactor and throw it out the back or you could use it in other ways like we accelerate it with a thermal arc and it's very safe and it also doubles as radiation shielding so it's an extremely useful substance in in terms of space the third thing that i'm excited about is the potential to get rare minerals such as lithium platinum and so on from the asteroids these are things that are in tight supply on earth and also of course part of the vision we have is that mining can be done in space without ecological impacts on the earth you're going to send a kind of an automatic factory to the asteroid it's going to mine water and the water will be the fuel used to return things to wherever they're going to go which could include earth and you don't actually need to land things on the earth in a rocket one way to do it is is to inject oxygen into the metal so it's like foam metal create a lifting body and just land it in the water somewhere so actually there's a lot of space startups right now and most of them you know we haven't heard of what are what are the ones that excite you well there's no question the most exciting space startup is spacex it's revolutionized that one we haven't heard of you have heard of that blue's important although i think they're so secretive it's kind of hard to know where they are most of the time one company i really like is planet they're an earth resources uh company they have really led the way in terms of uh doing things in lower cost small satellites launched on lower class rockets and also in terms of mission control their mission control for hundreds of satellites consists of one person in a room with an ai compare that with nasa where they have hundreds of people for each mission row upon a row of people behind specialized terminals i mean we're not talking 10 times cheaper or even 100 times cheaper we're talking a thousand times cheaper another exciting company is made in space they're very interested in printing things in space and doing robotic assembly in space well there's a lot of activity out there so let me just ask you one last question to wrap it up um the perseverance just landed on mars what do you think is most important about that the thing i'm really excited about is the moxie experiment moxie it is a test the very first test of what's called in situ research utilization or isru uh to take in the martian atmosphere and form liquid oxygen out of it of course astronauts could breathe oxygen but it's also necessary for rocket fuel we have no long-term future in space without using the resources of space and this is really the very first time that on a nasa emission there has been any attempt to even experimentally use resources right it's extremely exciting if successful it it it looks to a future where people landing on mars can refuel at gas stations that are already set up and fully fueled you just have to walk over to them and pump the fuel into your rocket and you can fly back to earth of course this is key to elon musk's vision for settling mars i it created a great vision there all right well thank you so much for joining us today i could talk about this all day long but we only have so much time so thank you for joining us well and thank you it's my pleasure so we just heard a little bit about what makes perseverance so exciting and we'll hear more about that and more from our next guest joining us now is shelly brunswick she's the chief operating officer of the space foundation that's a non-profit that promotes education collaboration and many other things uh for people engaged in space-related industries thank you for joining us shelley well thank you it's my privilege to join you to week this today as well as this what an exciting week and we get to talk about the great things that have just happened this past week but hopefully we'll we'll also be able to talk about the exciting things that are coming just like your last guest mentioned excellent all right well why don't we jump into it so we just heard a little bit about moxie one of the things that perseverance has been doing but could you start by just impressing us about how much of an accomplishment this is because i found out that only half of mars missions have ever landed successfully out of about 43 or something since 1960 so what what makes it so hard why is this so impressive well mars is always a challenge and nasa has had an amazing track record with eight successful landings so that includes way back in the 70s when they landed the um the uh the viking aircraft they've also landed obviously several rovers and then last year they had a successful landing with the insight lander but you know mars is challenging it has a different atmosphere it has a different uh you know it's a long way to get there there's a lot that can happen between that time frame but each of these missions which makes it so important is that the we're all working together we're sharing knowledge and we're learning how we can continue to advance as a species so there have been several other countries as you mentioned that have tried to go to mars and land a rover and although they've been able to successfully get to mars they may have not successfully landed and some of those are you know the former soviet union and russia the european space agency and japan but i don't want you to think about it as success or failure each of those attempts adds to the knowledge that we as human beings and earthlings all traveling on this planet together are learning and growing and developing so i also take my hat off to the other countries that are heading to mars that are at mars joining us and to those future countries that are operating in space that mars is challenging but we are going to overcome that as well as many other things and the great part similar to your last guest is the technology we learn by going to mars is going to help us here on earth okay so maybe you can explain some of those advances that we expect to be coming or what ex we heard about moxie tell us about some of the other more exciting ones well i think one of the really exciting things about perseverance that you may have heard from some of the other guests is that we have a lot more cameras on this system 23 cameras so we're going to have better better visuals of what mars looks like we have a helicopter that's going with us you know called ingenuity it's less than four pounds we're gonna see how that drone rover operates in a less dense atmosphere and how it'll work to capture more images and see what's out there but the other exciting part about percy is that it's going to look at being able to harvest oxygen from mars carbon dioxide atmosphere and by being able to do that we're that will then open the door to allow future missions that are going to have humans as well as um how do we operate engines in in on mars because engine operations require oxygen so this is really exciting and then when we throw in there that we're actually landing in a riverbed i mean think about the delta of mississippi or the okavango delta we have landed percy in this crater where there we know there was once water and we're going to be able to look for uh microbial organisms that we're going to be able to gather and eventually bring back to earth and find find those martians that everybody's looking for now they may be organisms that are very small and finite but this is the best place we're going to be able to locate those so that's why percy in this mission is so exciting how long do we expect it to operate because curiosity landed in 2012 and it's still going strong so how long do we expect the lifespan to be of this mission it's it's always hard to tell you know sometimes it can all depend on the weather on mars just like on earth you know we have some interesting weather well mars is even worse so it all depends on sandstorms but you can look at curiosity as going more than nine years so we're going to look at a really good life span for percy and also look at we're sending that next rover that's going to be able to capture that sample and bring it back to earth around 2026 and we hope to get those samples back to earth around 2031. so that should give you an idea of the time frame that we're looking at percy and the others curiosity to continue to operate you know all again depending on battery and battery battery storage and the weather on mars and again i shared with you as your last guest did a lot of the things we're doing to go to mars are going to benefit us here on earth and i just talked about those batteries and battery storage that is a critical element we have to advance before we can really look to send humans to colonize mars and batter battery energy and energy storage solutions are things we desperately also need here on earth as we transition away from certain energy sources to more renewable energy so i want to share that there's this earth component with this mars component and space component it's all interlinked in this global space ecosystem um okay lots of exciting developments to look forward to i want to change gears ever so slightly and talk about international cooperation in space um you mentioned you know the other countries that have had missions and we can all learn from that but there's a lot of uh real you know day-to-day things i suppose going on there's you know space junk and space traffic and you know how to manage going to the moon so how are we doing in terms of that that is a really great question so the first part i share with you is doing those types of things even on earth is challenging now you put in what is it like to have all these legal things going on in space copyright you know protecting assets doing other parts and pieces so there's a whole new career that's opened up called space law and so doing it here on earth is challenging and now figuring this out in space is also challenging but one of the things that nasa has taken has taken the lead on is creating the artemis accord and it's really looking at how do we provide a framework for governments and commercial companies to operate in space and so the nasa took the lead but there are eight founding partners that have started this you know it's australia canada japan luxembourg uh the united arab emirate the united kingdom and the u.s and those discussions are still going on because again the more countries we can bring together to say this is how we're going to work together in space and partner and collaborate and you know do rescue missions if astronauts are in trouble those are things we need to start thinking about now before we actually start sending humans back to the moon and onto mars do we think china and russia would be signatories to that that is a really great question you know there's some discussion about where right now the us is a partner with russia we have been partnered with them on the international space station for decades we still partner with them on going to the international space station and i believe that one of the places that diplomacy still reigns true is on space and scientific research and exploration after all we all are human beings and we all want to know why do we explore so there is the great things that nasa does when you think about the scientific side but think about the humanity side of it why do we explore what is out there what are we trying to accomplish i think those are things all nations can can agree on are important things for us to understand as a species and then again how do we capture that great technology that we are learning by exploring and commercialize that and better our lives here on earth i think those are important links to make in this whole process so we have about 30 seconds left but i just want to quickly ask you only about a thousand people ever have been to space so how soon do you think before that that will be open to more people well we know it's happening this year i'm sure you saw during the super bowl commercial spacex has announced their commercial flight to the international space station we see virgin galactic is also launching this year as well as blue origin so i think those opportunities are opening up but for your listeners who may not think that that's a possibility for them or that's not something that interests them what i would recommend is join us be an entrepreneur you can go to the nasa technology transfer office today take a patent bring it to market and commercialize it and unlock trillions of dollars of value for our economy employ people and create workforce development and economic opportunity right here on earth so thank you for inviting me today it's been a privilege to talk to you and i look forward to the next time we can get together wonderful thank you so much for joining us so coming up after the break how did black history month begin and what does it become now but first here's america q a this is a virus anyway it's got a you know a 99.5 survival rate i mean either you're going to get it or you're not i don't know why it wouldn't be i'm sure if you wore 12 would be better than one i'm not sure if i've already had it but they took the damn swab test twice i might have the first time now i have the immune i had early case of kovid and i went to my grandson's adoption and i didn't realize i had it and i was around a lot of people that day and nobody got it i don't think it could hurt you to wear one so even if you aren't wearing one and you feel that it's the wrong thing to do try to keep distance from people who feel that it is the right thing to do that's that's my take on it it's a free country people should be able to do what they feel is right for them if i go into a store ask for a mask i'll put it on i don't mind but to wear two well one would think so but you know there's also those who say you don't need a mask no i don't if you are wearing something as the little shirt sleeves they put over their face then you would probably benefit from wearing a regular surgical mask underneath that but other than that two surgical masks are not going to do much difference no i actually think one is good enough honestly i think one mask is enough just because i can't breathe honestly with the one that i'm wearing imagine wearing two of them i believe one is enough i do believe it is effective but i also believe it's a little excessive at the moment just because it's kind of hard even to get everyone to wear one mask you're wearing the mask taking off the mask and you're basically your lungs this is picking up all that particles all that residue that's there so i really don't even feel like the one mask you should be wearing all day i should think should be worn at a certain time when you're around high years it should be taken off no i don't think so i think one is enough i'm not for sure i guess if they say to mass or help i think maybe that's what we should do i think so yes probably yes i don't know i'm not a doctor probably used to wearing one mask every day and wearing two masks on top of this one is probably a little bit uh suffocating to me but i think one message to do i prefer just wear one mask well i mean i'm not a like a medical expert or anything but i believe it can be more effective yeah it's a little redundant to me two three four you know yeah i think it's kind of all the same i don't know if two's gonna help or not but if it does hey let's go for it you know to be honest i don't think it makes much of a difference i think either way uh yeah i think so i think i remember seeing like dr fatchi recently saying that i plan on wearing one under this one but i am not there yet trends may be fleeting but values are timeless we now bring you this new clothing brand with classic design and luxurious comfort it's our way of sharing hope and inspiration from the world of shenyun we bring you shenyan dancer weared with honor [Music] the seeds of black history month celebrated every february were sewn about 100 years ago and if you don't know that story we're about to find out joining us now is professor carol swain a truly remarkable woman and a prolific author a former professor political science about vanderbilt and princeton universities carol thank you for joining us today my pleasure um it's black history month as we all know but i'm not sure that everyone knows how it came about could you start by just sharing some of that history with us well actually i have not uh followed the the inception of when black history uh came about i know that in the 1960s after the civil rights movement that there's been more and more focus on black history and black there's a place for black history and there is a rich black history coming out of the period of slavery anyone that wants to know uh the true story of black americans especially in the aftermath of slavery should read booker t washington's up from slavery as well as web divorces the souls of black people but i see black history as a part of american history uh there we're intertwined because if you go back to 1619 when the first um blacks came to america in bondage and became indentured servants and then later uh slaves our histories are intertwined so when america was birthed in 1776 it was birthed with black people at that time they were slaves but we know that slavery ended there have been periods of jim crow racism but the celebration of black people in their lives i would say that came out of the 1960s but to say you know who came up with the idea of black history uh a month i actually uh don't know because i've never focused on that i've always focused on american history and the fact that blacks are part of american history great well i i i looked it up because i didn't know and i was very curious and enlighten me yeah well it started in 1915 the idea of it anyway um carter woodson he uh son of a slave owner he traveled to chicago where they were celebrating the 50th anniversary of emancipation and he saw all these great accomplishments of black americans and uh started a journal and anyway that eventually became black history week in 1925 and i think 1976 it became a month but uh the whole idea behind it was to celebrate the accomplishments and achievements of you know many great um you know african-american black americans so do you think there's a need for a black history month to focus specifically on it or do you think uh it should be you know we're all americans it should just be integrated well i mean again i i've said i believe that we're all americans and that the story of america is a story that's rich with black history and uh now that you mentioned carter g woodson i i'm very familiar with his work and the fact that the naacp was started in 1909 and um that um you know as a part of black history so blacks have their separate journey that includes the fact that during the period after or after slavery there were 22 blacks that served in congress most people don't know that uh and these blacks uh were republicans and uh so there's a rich period of history but it's also american history and now everyone has to have a history mob um pretty soon i guess we have white history month but i guess uh white history month according to the current narrative would all be about systemic racism and oppression and and speaking of which you know you mentioned the naacp founded in 1909 and it was founded to line up with the birth of abraham lincoln so february was february 12th and abraham lincoln was just canceled in san francisco they just took his name off of a school there um so it's rather well i have news for you all white people have been cancelled so if you don't know it you have been counseled by the current narrative uh and you might as well get used to it but you don't have to get used to it because we don't have the ability to cancel other human beings and i think that we would be so much better off as a nation if we focused on the things that bring us together and america as a nation was not based on bloodlines it was based on a set of ideals and principles those ideals and principles that has been that has been the glue that holds us together and the more we focus on identity politics and every little group sep interest the more divided we become and we will follow as a nation if we keep dividing ourselves up and so i think we really need to focus on uh the principles and values that bring us together a lot of those offend in the constitution the declaration of independence and in the documents that truly relate to our judeo-christian history because a lot of the things that we find in our laws and our values and principles they have deep roots that go back to america's founding and america's story is black america's story and the story of every group that's come to america uh from whatever nation to become american and it was too bad that we stopped you know becoming americans and too many of us have decided to cling to our past identities or the nations that we left behind and especially the idea in america that anyone can become anything actually i'm very inspired by your own story um if we should be celebrating anybody during black history month we should be celebrating people like you maybe you can share some of your own personal history with our audience well yeah my story i was born in the rural south uh in 1954 and that was a time when systemic racism really did exist because the south was segregated and i started uh schooled in segregated schools and i watched the civil rights movement on television we had a television and i watched the passage of the civil rights act of 1964 the voting rights act of 1965 the open housing act of 1968 and opportunities were created for people like me and i was able to get i dropped out of school after the eighth grade but i was able to get a high school equivalency go to a community college and get the first of five college and university degrees i was an honor student i ended up becoming a university professor was tenured early at princeton i was promoted to full professor at vanderbilt my work has been cited by the u.s supreme court i've won national awards and i have lived the american dream and america is a land of enormous opportunities but what you believe affects very much what you're able to accomplish i believed in america i believe if you worked hard you could overcome the circumstances of your birth i was able to do that but i can say that i had helping hands along the way because in america people want other people to be successful and so i had mentors that reached out to me and my mentors did not look like me and so i can say that america is a land of enormous opportunities but unfortunately the messages that we're sending people of color and not just people of color everyone white black asian we're getting these messages that america is a racist country that we should be ashamed of who we are and that's very destructive had i believed the messages that we sent our young people today i don't know if i would be the success story i am today maybe i would have given up maybe i'd still be in the rural south in poverty so what messages were you receiving at that time how is it that you um you know broke out of as you said which was real systemic racism with the jim crow laws etc to become so successful well i think it's interesting that we were in such poverty but my mother cloned to that protestant work ethic we didn't take handouts so as a child we did not sign up for free lunches free uh books and all the free things we could have gotten which meant i had to do my homework in school um but my mother sent the message that she expected us to work hard and it was just an expectation and things you know changed with my family in the 70s and 80s and and so the messages changed over time but i think that my mother and my grandparents instilled in some of us and it didn't work with all the kids there were 12 of us and so we went our different ways but what i got was that i really could become whatever um i wanted to become and i set my sights low initially i wanted to be a store manager and so when i went to the community college to get my first degree in business i thought i'd work at a mall but people came into my life my life and they encouraged me and i increasingly set my sights to higher and higher goals never thinking i'd become a university professor and i can say people steered me in that direction and i just think america is a land of such opportunity but my family never sent the message that because of the color of my skin that i couldn't do something and i believe again that whatever if you don't believe something is possible if you believe the world is stacked against you you don't believe something is possible you're not going to try it but if you believe the world is stacked against you then why get out of bed and so i was never instilled with that and i've always had a can do attitude and if someone told me that i couldn't do something i was going to show them that i could and so when i was in college i was approached by minority students who gave me the list of all the racist professors to avoid i immediately signed up for their courses because i was going to show them and they became my strongest allies they were not racist professors they were professors that held everyone to the same standard unfortunately i don't believe there are that many professors that do that today because they would feel that their jobs would be jeopardized because some student would complain well that's an extremely inspiring story and extremely inspiring words to leave our audience with so thank you so much for joining us today my pleasure succeeding in space and addressing complex social problems all of that requires high levels of critical thinking our next guest he thinks we've got a serious problem in that regard we're joined now by dr steve perlman he's dedicated the last three decades to teaching writing and thinking about critical thinking he also helps other professors and executives raise their critical thinking outcomes and he has a soon to be released book called america's critical thinking crisis the failure and promise of education could you just define for us what you consider critical thinking just so we're all on the same page what is it oh sure well that's a great question and one of the real problems in this critical thinking crisis is our capacity to define critical thinking in any meaningful way at all for our purposes here today i i think any mix of problem solving and decision making and logic any of those broad scope terms are sufficient because the research really shows that students aren't learning any of them so because of this problem with the definition do you think people are walking around thinking they're either learning or being taught critical thinking and they're not yeah that's absolutely exactly what's happening in fact when we we poll faculty members or we pull students both groups report that higher education and sometimes even k through 12 improves their critical thinking or faculty believe that they are in fact doing things to improve students critical thinking now that's on the first pass when we probe them more deeply however when we ask faculty members well what do you really do to teach critical thinking how do you really know that you're teaching it what multiple studies show us is that faculty ultimately sort of admit that they don't know that they're really teaching it that they'll admit that they try to do certain things in class that they hope work and that they admit that they really don't know that they're having a demonstrable effect upon their students when they leave the educational institution it's a they actually are studies that that deem that faculty can only be quote-unquote hopeful about what they're doing with respect to critical thinking interesting okay so i assume all this ties back to what you say is a flawed conception of what education means so can you explain that to us in the connection to critical thinking oh absolutely we are stuck in what is a paradigm in the united states educational system and it's we're still lagging behind the world a little bit more now and falling farther and farther behind where we still have an educational system predicated on what is already known and predicated on existing answers and predicated on the regurgitation of information that's not to say that some educators and classes and institutions don't try to move beyond that to varying degrees but it is to say on the whole that's still where the the locus of our efforts lies so what do we have to do instead what we have to do instead is we have to build an education system based on problem solving based on the encountering of wicked problems and what isn't known and the problem comes with that is that then we need some way to assess how well are we doing in assessing whether or not students are able to engage in wicked problems and how well are they able to apply information to problems that don't actually have direct answers very interesting so what do you see as the main problems being in you know raising generations that aren't taught critical thinking well i think if we look right now around the united states what we see don't make this a political statement we see a lot of people in the country who are inclined to follow authority incline not to know how to process information that they're seeing on the internet how to separate what's fictional from what's reality and we need to be able to educate people in such a way that they can engage information in a way where they're able to reason through it now unfortunately what we see in education is even among those educators who think they're doing that and there are some probably who really are but look at most of the research on this what we see is that educators who even think they're doing that we realize aren't when we ask them well how do you teach critical thinking and they say well i i give them hard discussion questions well unfortunately what the research has brought out is that discussion in class even about an interesting topic doesn't teach critical thinking any more than just lecturing that students and we know that lecturing ex students doesn't actually teach critical thinking at all and i noticed a very interesting thing you said is that students are actually showing lower brain activity when they're in class than even watching television so that that sounds kind of crazy can you tell us what that means what the consequences of that are yeah it sounds counterintuitive admittedly because we think that school must be a place where our minds are rich with action and so forth but the dominant means of education in the united states is still unfortunately lecture and we know that lecture in fact has been called to hurt the brain by neuroscientists and the reason is that our brains actually enjoy thinking and they enjoy reasoning and they're designed to do that what our brains don't enjoy is being given a lot of information as we're sitting passively and unable to move for long periods of time and information that we don't see meaningful purpose for in our immediate lives it's not to say that there might not be some purpose for this information later on perhaps in a test or way down the road but our brains are really designed to value that information that comes that sort of has immediate application so as we sit in these classes passively our brains effectively turn off and the reason they turn off is because they find this so distasteful what is happening that it's easier for them to shut off than having to contend with the experience of being there and that's why we find that in life however it's a very rich environment even for children think about being in a sandbox if you're in a sandbox and as a child there are rich and complicated problems in that sandbox there's what to do with the sand and what to play with and what to build and what to make but there's also maybe some other child in the sandbox do we play with them what happens if one's throwing sand in our face is this pleasurable or displeasurable and so forth but in in education we get into a class potentially where information is being presented to us so easily that we don't have to think about it that we don't have to think about it and that's what our brains find so displeasurable and that's why our brains turn off fascinating i promise you i was engaged i wasn't just passively listening there so what do you think is the key what should education look like if we want to create good problem solvers well yeah that's great question and it's a very easy problem to fix in terms of finances it's a very easy problem to fix overall we don't need a lot of new technologies we don't need smart classrooms we need a little more teacher training and we need different teacher training we need teacher training to be built around what is called problem-based learning which is a fancy word that education has for how we engage everything in life which is that we encounter a problem and then we learn things to work our way through that problem those problems could be in personal lives or those problems could be in our professional lives or what have you but everything that we learn and do in life for the most part unless we have a particular interest in something but everything is built on a problem that we encounter and then we grow as a result of that problem and the second thing that we do that goes along with that is something called mastery learning which is the ability to fail forward without a lot of penalty happening to us and school right now really penalizes the notion of failure we take a test we have one chance to pass that test and if we don't pass there's a big penalty for us we know what that does that shuts off the brain the brain gets scared and when our brain gets scared the higher parts of our brain the parts in charge of higher order reasoning and complex thinking they tend to shut down in favor of the lower parts which are concerned with survival so we need to remove this notion that if we fail the first time we're in some terrible kind of situation we need to open people up to the capacity to fail a little bit and then try again and do better the next time and that enables the brain to relax and to explore ideas more broadly rather than just worrying about getting the right answer if we can get those two things in place broadly speaking those are two of the biggest keys we have the third is simply to have a real critical thinking standard to define it for our students to tell them that we're going to assess them on it to show them how we assess them on it and to make sure they understand and are involved with the process of being assessed on critical thinking so they really know what we mean by it excellent well very interesting thank you so much for joining us today thank you so much for having me and that's all for today's show thank you so much for watching the nation speaks be sure to join us every saturday 11 a.m to noon eastern and from all of us here have a great [Music] week [Music] don't let youtube decide what information you get that's your choice youtube is deleting our videos and cuts you off from a source of honest reporting make sure you don't lose access to ntd's news content and take a quick moment to subscribe to our newsletter so no matter what happens here you'll keep your access to a trustworthy news source