As someone who started with C and then made a really hard effort to become an expert C programmer, when later in life I was introduced to Smalltalk and Lisp, I was angry that C had warped my brain and I could only think of programming in the context of a physical machine. I feel it would have been much better to go in the opposite direction.

That sounds wonderful! A real overview of the programming landscape, and definitely a good start assuming they follow my other points as well. I'd love to take that course.

You can do that on edx.org