But C is also a bad first language, which is why Pascal was historically always the teaching language of choice.
The only problem with not learning assembler first is shown by all the masses of C questions being posted here these days - almost all of which are because the poster hasn't got a clue what a PIC is or what resources and limitations it has. A modicum of assembler knowledge would (and does) cure this, because it's impossible to use assembler without that knowledge.
It's like trying to learn to write a foreign language, without first knowing what the letters are! - think Arabic/Russian/Chinese, not French!