I agree 100%. All the academic background in the world doesn't prepare you for what the school of hard knocks does. 2-3 years on the job programming taught me more than any school could. We all know the academic solutions, but do we ever use them?

In all seriousness, I started out in middle school tooling around with BASIC, but my real programming career started out with functional C. It's very basic, and simple enough to learn, and I have found that even to this day every new language I learn always seems familiar... like C. I definitely see the value in Java, mostly for teaching OOP, and I think its a great second step. If they start out with C and get their feet wet with it and move on to OOP, it seems like a solid foundation to build on.