I can say without a doubt that having functional programming knowledge first would have been a phenomenal advantage.
I do think that another major advantage for Python is the fact that you can do cooler things with it, faster. CS has a serious funnel problem and the quicker we can get students to do cool things with CS (GUI stuff, web stuff), the better CS education will be.
The issue is these skills don't solve serious or interesting problems. GUI and web programming have become easier than ever and requires less programmers on staff to perform. My company can't find enough qualified engineers with a good depth of knowledge in CS.
I've found functional concepts have been incredibly important in shipping maintainable code on the JVM using both Java 8 and Scala.
Nowadays, though, I feel like my time spent getting used to functional programming in school has given me a secret weapon. It's something much more subtle than the ability to bandy about obscure words that probably start with M. I really do think I'm just fundamentally better at dealing with abstraction, both using it and creating it, than my peers who haven't had such an experience. And that's not small beans considering that, to an approximation, working with abstractions is what I do all day every day.