I have no idea what language should be teached, but I definitely know which language should be learned first: one you can start using right away, where you can experience your first successes one hour after starting fooling around, where experimenting with stuff is easy.
That means:

• No compilation
• As high-level language as possible. I don't believe you take bad habits if you don't know what is a buffer overflow and a pointer when you start. You can learn that later, once you start writing video games and device drivers.
• A console, to try things out.

Obvious candidates are Python and Ruby, and both have the added advantage of being used in the real world.

>>115
Definitely, because unlike your time, these CPU are really expensive!