From NPR’s interview with Ray Bradbury earlier this month:
Gross: “Wait, you don’t want to come back and find out if we’ve landed on Mars or not? You want to come back and see how the grade schools are doing?”
Bradbury: “It’s not going to do any good to land on Mars if we’re stupid. And I want to save the future generation, I want to teach them to read when they’re 5 and 6 and 7 years old. If we don’t do that, we lose them forever.