It's really good to know how things works underneath, but insisting that constantly messing with low-level details is "real" programming (and implying high-level details aren't "real") is weird. Both aspects - high and low-level - are important.

Beginners are taught high-level languages because it's easy to start with - one could create something useful without learning lots of things. If they care about their craft, eventually they will learn all the gory details of the stack underneath down to bare metal - an occasions (bugs, weird behaviors or just curiosity) where, say, Python programmer is invited to go and peek under the hood of their interpreter or libc or kernel or even hardware happens every now and then.

Unless all that pythonista's doing is bashing some boring CRUDs with Django. Then, a knowledge of low-level stuff seems almost unnecessary. But, hey, someone has to do that kind of programming, too.