In August of 1966, the youngest person who had ever appeared on the cover of Fortune magazine was John Scutieri, then 3½ years old.
Plump-cheeked and dapper in a red collared shirt, Scutieri is pictured at a keyboard, “engrossed in learning how to read and write with the aid of Edison Responsive Environment’s Talking Typewriter.” He was one of 125 children in a special preschool program in Mount Vernon, New York, and the instrument, the magazine explained, was “in the vanguard of the technology that is knocking at the schoolhouse door.”
Scutieri—now 63, a father of four, and a grandfather of three—remembers being inside that contraption as a daunting experience. “What I recall is it was much like a telephone booth that you had to step up inside of it, and somebody closed the door,” he told me when I reached him by phone in December at his business, North Elm Home Furnishings, in Millerton, N.Y. “It was a little frightening.” A former mayor of Millerton, Scutieri admitted that much of his recollection of that preschool educational experience was a “blur,” but said that he did grow up with an “appreciation for technology.”
In that 1966 issue, Fortune writer Charles E. Silberman explained how government spending was creating rich incentives for corporations to produce educational technology—“a prime example of Lyndon Johnson’s ‘creative federalism’ at work.”
“The past year has seen an explosion of interest in the application of electronic technology to education and training,” Silberman wrote. “Hardly a week or month goes by without an announcement from some electronics manufacturer or publishing firm that it is entering the education market via merger, acquisition, joint venture, or working arrangement… Business has discovered the schools, and neither is likely to be the same again.”
That relationship between business and education has only deepened. Indeed, the last couple of decades have seen major investments in the development of educational technology for classrooms and individuals. These range from classroom smartboards to online tutoring services to venture-backed MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). And the rise of generative A.I. is only accelerating students’ interactions with tech, for better and for worse.
Of course, children today don’t need educational prompting to find their own way into tech proficiency. Scutieri’s 6-year-old grandchild, for example, is adept at using an Apple Watch, he said, quipping, “It’s a bit above what I was doing, right?”
Even so, Scutieri worries about whether society is training and preparing young people the right way for the challenges, opportunities, and dangers ahead in the AI era: “I think we’re on the cusp of something enormous, and it needs to be treated correctly,” he told Fortune. And he wants to see federal, state, and local governments engaging with—and funding—that educational enterprise.
Just as when he was a preschooler at the dawn of the Information Age, Scutieri says, “our education and the government have to work together.”
