I had to read Romeo and Juliet my Freshman year in high school. My understanding is that R&J is a fairly common Freshman text. Your point about Calculus doesn't quite fit either because you don't need an extensive foundation to start programming. That's why we see a lot more 14 year olds programming than doing Calculus. You're a genius if you're doing Calculus at age 14, but I bet a lot of people who read this site started programming that early or earlier. I'm sure we've got our fair share of accelerated math people as well, but they jut are not as common.
My point is that I feel the things that C illustrates and the style of programming it enforces are not that important to learn if you are just starting to program. If you are approaching it from an academic math/CS standpoint, you'd be better off teaching something much simpler like Scheme, and if you're approaching it from a building-cool-stuff sort of hands-on standpoint, I suggest you would be better off teaching Python, Ruby, or one of many other languages with less drudge work (a lot of syntax cruft, manual memory allocation, not very abstract) to do than C.
There may be value to learning C, but I think it's not a good return on investment of your time until you understand many other foundational ideas about programming and CS.
Sure, let's count learning to read, write, and spell correctly.... oh wait, you use that for programming too. ;-)
Also, you should probably revise your thinking so "English" isn't just everything that has to do with books. It's critical theory, complex analysis, and a bunch of other things. The stuff most people do in 1st through 6th grade is to English as learning how to type is to programming.
