I'm with Kate Gregory on the "Stop teaching C" (actually Kate specifically means in order to then teach C++ but I also think it's probably fine to stop teaching C outright)

But whilst Kate is right in terms of pedagogy, as a larger philosophy this is inadequate. As a language C++ is obviously defective and the explanation is almost invariably "Because C" which only makes sense once you appreciate C++ in terms of C.

The built-in array type in C++ is garbage. Why is it garbage? This is a language with all these powerful features, why doesn't its array type leverage any of them? It's because this is actually the array type from C.

OK, maybe just the array type is trash, that's obviously not good, but it's one defect. How about string literals. Oops. C++ does sort of technically have the string literals you actually wanted, but the syntax for them is weird and you need the standard library not the core language... the ones you get for "Some text" are C's constant strings, an array of bytes with an extra zero byte, and well, the array type sucks.

This carries on, the language doesn't provide real tuples, it doesn't provide a real sum type, its built-in types don't believe in methods but user types do, everywhere there are weird choices which are non-sensical except for the reality that it's what C does.

And then at the end of that, the language isn't actually compatible with C. It's close, a lot of stuff works, and more stuff kinda-sorta works enough that you may be surprised when it fails, but there isn't the sort of robust compatibility you might expect given the enormous sacrifices made for this goal.