Why C? Why not just programming skills in general? Language constructs and use are the important part. Fixing on the syntax of one language is too focused - the emphasis should be on the commonality between all languages and examples should show how various languages do the same job and how some are more suited for particular tasks than others.

Personally I've managed a computing degree and over thirty years in the software industry without touching C. Fortran, pascal, Assembler code, vb.net, cobol, php and lots of other languages (and of course SQL) but never C or C++