Good thing i don't have to promote anything - they've been using pascal for teaching for more than 10 years now, yay! (probably even more, cause i don't know when it was started actually ) First we were taught with Turbo Pascal (i fall into that category), but around 2002-2003 they've switched to freepascal (i mean country-wide, not just my school). There is even some sort of IDE developed to avoid using the default console editor :shock:
In universities they're kind of undecided though.. When i first came they've just switched from teaching pascal to c++/java hybrid, but apart from those classes, one can write his projects in almost anything he wants