I have also been told that sometimes people get interested in the future and reading sci-fi and the future because some teacher assigns it. That scares me a little bit because I think some people will react by not wanting to read it because it is an assignment. I hope that not the case. But I like the idea of people coming together in classrooms and reading science fiction. This way ideas can be generated by the whole class.
People can hear what other people think.
That's another way of helping people to think about the future. Actually many sci-fi writers do. It's just that unfortunately people get the wrong idea about science fiction because most people don't read very much of it. So I suppose that you can say anything I've written about is something that just stayed with me and kept at me. My mother's life was even more remarkable for the changes she saw.