Re: He didn't really say it was Agile's fault
My old man complaint was when my university switched from teaching basic programming in C, then C++, then Java to starting and continuing in Java with a sidenote in C. Java is too abstract to be a good teaching language for computer science - if you don't trip over a null pointer once or twice, if you don't have to explicitly allocate/de-allocate memory, it's harder to appreciate the resource management required. The GC just makes all that go away but when teaching how to code I genuinely believe that resource management is as important as control flow to learn. Memory, disk, and CPU resource management can and should be taught, and of those memory is the one that you're interacting with the most in basic programming.