There's two groups of programmers, those who started learning with low-level, and those who started with high-level languages. I'm personally in the former group, and think there are definite advantages to doing it that way. You are probably in the latter.
Sure, for adults, that's fine (but I still disagree with the approach, as pointers are a notably tricky concept that really isn't necessary in the beginning). But it's like saying that before teaching a kid addition and multiplication they should understand the Dedekind–Peano axioms -- it's simply overkill and more likely to discourage them than anything else. (But it depends on age and aptitude, of course, so obviously YMMV).
FWIW I started with K&R, but times have changed and I definitely don't think it's a pedagogically sound way of teaching programming.
Back in the mid-to-late 20th century, there was a movement to teach mathematics rather that way, though I don't think it ever got as far as teaching small children the Peano axioms. The "New Mathematics", they called it. I remember encountering talk of sets and functions in UK primary school circa 1975.
It never worked very well in practice. I expect that when you're fortunate enough to have unusually able teachers teaching unusually able pupils it might do OK -- but then, in that situation, anything will do OK.
(Tom Lehrer fans will know about this from his song "New Math", with "It's so simple, so very simple, that only a child can do it" in the refrain.)
For the record: Lehrer-style "new math" was what I was taught at elementary school in Ontario in the 1980s. I know it was not what my parents had been taught, because they couldn't understand how we did subtraction. We did do some other bases (mainly binary, as I recall) as well as modulus.
I don't think it's comparable to teaching arithmetic from a highly theoretical basis, since the type of low-level beginnings I'm advocating for are starting from a concrete foundation --- logic gates from relays and such, not unlike the approach used by Petzold's book Code.
Incidentally, that book has been praised for making computation easy to understand for non-programmers, which I would consider to be evidence for starting out low-level.
but times have changed
Not for the better, if you look at the average state of software today --- and I think a lot of it can be explained by the general lack of low-level knowledge.
