Actually, there's a (devil's advocate) argument for teaching assembly first. After all, TAOCP is all assembly for good reason. Many programmers who never learn any assembly language lack a kind of procedural literacy, as well as a mechanical sympathy, which are a big part of the craft of programming.

But, as you state, there are a lot of higher-level programming concepts you can't effectively learn in assembler (one imagines a bizarrely circuitous route around learning to build compilers in assembly (via Forth perhaps) in order to teach lexical scoping or similar).