Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it all depends of your goals, if you learn to cook in order to impress your friends, no you probably don't need chemistry lessons, but if you plan to win 3 Michelin stars for your restaurant, you probably need to. Same for programmation, if you just want to ease your work, compute quickly some math formulas, etc, you can start with Python. But if you plan to write the next big OS, you better start with C...
No, you absolutely don't need to start with C. You need to learn C (or some equivalently low-level language) eventually .
I agree with this. I started with Python, then later learned C. Taking the top down approach has several benefits when learning. You can make programs that actually do things much more rapidly, incentivising continued learning; this can not be emphasized enough. Less time is wasted wrestling with the many subtleties of something like C. Although important, knowing about pointers and memory allocation is unnecessary when trying to get across very basic fundamentals like control flow. Python also acts as a model for good abstractions. If you start out working with Python's list type, lists are already a familiar concept when it comes time to implement a linked list, because you understand how it should* work. By the time the student is ready to learn something like C, they already have a solid grasp on how things are supposed to work, so understanding how they actually work becomes substantially easier.
*CPython's list type is really a dynamic array, and it works better as a stack. However the interface is similar enough to a typical linked list, that it gets the point across.