the concept not being taught an actual language is rather weird. in my course we used Pascal as an introductory language (which later changed to modula2) when learning the basics of programming, then ansi c for more programming theory, graphics programming and systems programming. then we switched to COBOL for a subject that i forget about, used Prolog in an AI subject, SR in some other subject, Java in an interweb programming subject, Visual Basic for a subject that was basically about GUIs and a cut-back version of Assembly in a systems architecture subject.
we were also taught the basics of SQL for a database subject, and i think we used Miranda at one point, too. i can't remember. point is that they tried to give us a well-rounded look at a bunch of different kinds of programming languages.