I can't speak to other areas but Silicon Valley was definitely like that.
In the 1980s in Palo Alto, my high school AP Computer Science teacher asked parents to come in and give guest lectures in the last few weeks of class. Donald Knuth's daughter was in my class so he came and talked about TeX. Another kid's parent was a VP at a bank; he talked about secure transaction processing for ATMs. My dad (a researcher in robotics and AI) talked about expert systems.
In the 1980s in Palo Alto, my high school AP Computer Science teacher asked parents to come in and give guest lectures in the last few weeks of class. Donald Knuth's daughter was in my class so he came and talked about TeX. Another kid's parent was a VP at a bank; he talked about secure transaction processing for ATMs. My dad (a researcher in robotics and AI) talked about expert systems.
It was okay. :-)