Most schools nowadays start with Java for a programming language, mainly because it's relatively simple, is managed (basically means you can't shoot yourself in the food or fuck up so bad your machine will hang, the VM will catch errors and throw exceptions), has garbage collection (meaning you don't have to worry about memory management) and most importantly: the syntax is very similar to C.

Once you've got the hang of Java, it's only a small step to learn C/C++ and C#, as they are all very similar, but do things just a tad differently. Main thing you have to learn when changing from Java to C is working with pointers and memory management.