I strongly disagree, when I was 15 I got the same advice and it nearly turned me away from programming. K&R is not a good standalone text book. (Sure I had no internet and just a redhat5 clone, but K&R just was not that helpful)

I would pick Rust to learn over C when starting today. Rust matches today's machine beter. It is a more organized language and eco system. And most of all learning to code corect is easier when you do not run into undefined behaviour right and left.

So a modern language like Rust will expose more concepts to you and picking up C is easier afterwards, although you might not want to.