If everyone learns to code, coding will not be a high-paying career anymore. Also many people can't code, because it is too detail-oriented. If one line of code has a typo, it doesn't work. Some coding also requires advanced math skills. Really not well thought out at all. But what more can we expect from the establishment?
Object-oriented languages like Java, C# and Python are quite a bit easier to deal with compared to other languages, since you don't have to think about the whole system as much -- your code generally is more contained. Plus they protect you from having to deal with pointers which can be extremely annoying to deal with. Like, compare it to C, and you'll get a glimpse of how much worse things can be. Compare it to LISP and you will see a much clearer picture of how much worse things can be.
At my university we started with C for understanding some of the underlying stuff that other languages kind of hide from you, then moved to C++ and Java for learning about OO programming and how to use it most effectively. Pretty sure our algorithms class used C or C++. We were also repeatedly told that if you know one of those three languages, you know them all (which is more or less true). Can't really tell if it's the material given in class without an example, but I remember that everyone loved our professor for the algorithms class and I don't think many people struggled in the class so quality of the material does matter.