I don't know if you guys are making me feel old, or under privileged. When I was in High School, my choices were BASIC and Pascal. Pascal was typically taught at the vocational school and 1 semester long (3 hour class). The year I took it, the teacher said if we passed with a b or higher we could do a 1 semester independent study on C. So many of us from our school signed up for it, the school ran it in house instead. 1 hour, year long pascal course.

There is a lot of market out there for Java.   It's a good skill to have.   

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/03/10/0348241/The-Value-of-BASIC-As-a-First-Programming-Language came across this today morning.