Well it depends on the school, vision and career you're pursuing. For example I studied Digital Art and Animation, the first approach I had with programming was Java and I and every colleague hated it because we had a very bad teacher and because they make that class with ITC students so we had a really bad time with our first approach. In that class, in theory, we learn the basics and started using it in other languages, but fortunately I have AS3 by my side, and taught myself that to understand everything in a visual way. And when I learn javascript I understand that everything that I knew was kind of wrong at least for the Java part.
My experience tells me that teaching Java for first timers could be a very bad idea, specially if they will not pursue a programming career which every colleague did, except for myself. For 4 and a half years of college basically did not know enough to do stuff with Java, only AS3 and Javascript, I did not touched or did something again with Java since my first year of college.